I still have my sub’s grey steel em rule. It’s on my desk as I write. Pica ems on one side, eight and ten em measures on the reverse, millimetres on both, sharp edges designed to draw blood.
Don’t yawn. I know those days are dead and buried. But I’m making a point …
My benchmark for technology is simple: is it as easy and reliable as a pencil and rule? Does it enhance creativity, or get in the way? If you think that’s barmy, then you’d have to question the sanity of a whole generation of production journalists who fell head over heels for those first shoebox-sized Classics and have remained faithful to Apple ever since.
Quark and Macs went hand in hand, and together they played their part in a massive leap forward for global newspaper design. But it’s a love affair on the wane.
I’m surprised how many journalism colleges still use Quark. Side by side, InDesign leaves Quark standing, in my view. OK, InDesign may not be quite as intuitive. But given its bells and whistles, Adobe suite integration and price (£540 for the whole CS4 shooting match against Quark’s budget-busting £810), it’s no contest.
However, what I’d really like to do is ditch them both (for the vast majority of layout jobs, anyway).
I’m reminded of the curious conversations I used to have with Mirror Group IT supremo, David Jones. A fine journalist by background; a gentleman if ever there was one and a seriously bright chap.
He was convinced he could invent a simple system for automating newspaper page layout. After all, he argued, there weren’t that many permutations. I didn’t mention to anyone he fancied testing it out on the Coventry Evening Telegraph. Or that I agreed.
It didn’t come to pass. But whatever I thought at the time, I reckon he was on to something. He identified an issue and applied a ‘can-do’ approach. And that’s exactly what’s happening all around us.
I’ve said it before, but you can’t have a multimedia journalist without multimedia kit. Ideally that means a laptop carrying an integrated platform that lets every journalist act as editor, video editor, photographer, reporter or even sub. It means browser-based solutions that don’t leave memory-crunching lumps of software hanging around, pumping out elephantine files. Let’s go open source, too, so new solutions can evolve as quickly as our business and be introduced at a moment’s notice. And everything must be cheap.
I thought of David Jones again last summer as I was listening to Scandinavian editors describe their move to layout-driven editing, streamlining the workflow to its simplest form. And I’m becoming more convinced that anything is possible the more I use Wordpress, Twitter, Flickr, Evernote, Publish2 and the rest.
This is functionality I couldn’t have dreamed of ten years ago. And it’s free.
Bring on the Firefox layout plugin, I say.
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