Editor & Publisher was good to me

Editor & Publisher magazine bills itself as “the bible of the newspaper industry” in an on-line article today announcing its own demise. For 125 years the magazine has been a tool of the trade and I’ve been a reader for about 40 of those years.

Even now I check the on-line edition almost daily for news of the industry. Back in the day, I was a subscriber and I checked the classifieds each week for job leads because it was the best - virtually the only - national newspaper jobs list.

E&P has been good to me. In the late 60’s and early 70’s it ran my articles on Advocate innovations, including one on the design and construction of the Advocate’s unique and expansive photo labs and studio in the old building on West Main Street. It also featured articles I wrote on the Advocate’s universal desk system. This was before newsroom computerization when “universal desk” was some kind of a murky goal held by lots of editors who seemed unable to make it work.

The Advocate’s system for handling the flow of editorial content received broad recognition, thanks to E&P. Later, I wrote and self-published (by using a Memeograph machine) a booklet on this subject and E&P added to the list of books it sold. Sales were surprisingly good.

The magazine also featured some of my studies in certain kinds of newspaper photos and at various times showcased the Advocate’s pictures as illustrations of what was happening in photojournalism.

Ironic, though, that in the end E&P was snared by the same kind of economic trap that is killing off newspapers. It’s all about profits; not service, not pride.

But then E&P editors themselves on many occasions flunked as technicians and as thinkers, in my opinion. Among the most glaring example of this was the series of columns by Steve Outing, who calls himself a media “thought leader.” Steve never uses two words where three paragraphs will fit, a true annoyance in a trade mag that should know how to use language. Among Outing’s leadership essays was the announcement that he had cancelled his printed newspaper and was sucking up free on-line news. He used this to illustrate his theory (with which I disagree) that printed newspapers are unnecessary and will all die off.

Maybe such “leadership” on the pages of E&P has influenced the overall health of newspapers, many of them struggling for life. I suspect it is the overall health of newspapers that came back to bite “the bible of the newspaper industry.” I hope E&P editors will see the irony if, as seems probable, whatever replaces E&P turns out to be an on-line version.