Changing the shape of The Daily Review

Birthday No. 59 is coming up in a couple of months, and the idea of fitting into 30-year-old Levis seems like science fiction.
But at least I can fit into skinnier columns.
The Daily Review has changed over the last couple of editions, in ways you can see and ways that aren’t immediately apparent. Visible or otherwise, these changes are connected with trends that affect newspapers all over the country.
Change No. 1: The Daily Review’s dimensions are smaller.
When you start buying 30 or 40 600-pound rolls at a time, the consumption and cost of newsprint weigh on the mind. As a group, newspaper publishers can squeeze a nickel pretty hard. And they’ve noticed that tabloid newspapers like the New York Daily News (“Ford to city: Drop dead!”) and the New York Post (“Headless body in a topless bar!”) often do as well as their larger broadsheet competitors.
Supermarket tabloids (“Elvis fathers alien child out of wedlock!”) have their own special fan base. Even with their smaller size, they have plenty of room for exclamation points!
Another trend is that newspaper readership is moving to digital newspapers faster than advertising is making the same journey.
So newspapers have been shrinking all over the country. The Daily Review joined the club Thursday, when we began printing on what is known as the 22-inch web.
We’re actually late in making the switch. It was getting to the point at which some of our advertisers had to change the size of ads that had run elsewhere to fit our wider columns.
Some people think the smaller size makes the paper easier to handle. (Household hint: My high school journalism teacher told our class that Herbal Essences shampoo would get newspaper ink out of clothing. This was the 1970s, so even the boys had five or six bottles of Herbal Essences stashed away somewhere.)
Others may worry that they’re being shortchanged, newswise. For what it’s worth, the newsroom scuttlebutt has it that we seem to be putting as much copy into the paper as we did before the switch. We still need to come up with about 1,000 words to do the Louisiana briefs, and we still get three to five stories on the front page, along with a large photo and a mugshot or two.
Maybe it’s magic.
Change No. 2: A new pagination program.
Pagination is the process by which stories, photos, headlines and the rest are assembled, and then turned into an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file that is in turn used to make a printing plate.
Before the big change, we used an Adobe program called QuarkXPress, which was high tech in its day. Guttenberg may actually have used Quark to print his first Bible.
But we had to switch to yet another Adobe program called InDesign (part of an application suite that includes InDecisive and InDeepDooDoo) to accommodate …
Change No. 3: A new printing venue.
Consolidation of printing facilities is another industry megatrend. Those penny-pinching newspaper execs hate to see a printing press sitting idle most of the day. That role is traditionally reserved for columnists.
So companies, including Louisiana State Newspapers, that own multiple newspaper properties, including The Daily Review, have begun to print on presses that serve several papers.
We’re now being printed in Eunice, r esulting in …
Change No. 4: Earlier deadlines.
While we can move those page files to Eunice via the internet, no one has figured out how to attach thousands of copies of each day’s edition to an email. So we need something like a truck.
After our papers are printed, the trip from Eunice to Morgan City takes 2-2½ hours, time that had to get carved out of our production cycle.
In short, our deadlines are earlier.
We’ve been asking people to submit Around Town items — happy birthdays, happy anniversaries and the like — and Wheel House community calendar items by 4 p.m. the day before publication. You can use the email news@daily-review.com.
Obituaries should be submitted by 8 a.m. on the day of publication. The email for those is obits@daily-review.com.
As the folks used to say right before giving you a whuppin’, these new deadlines hurt us more than they hurt you. We hope you’ll be patient and come to feel you’re receiving a better value because of these changes.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review. Reach him at bdecker@daily-review.com.