THURSDAY's LETTERS: Does Size Matter in E-Publishing, Maureen Dowd, Evolution

By: E&P Staff We continue to limp along in this way, between online editors, but will offer up a few new missives today. Please send your comments and we will try to add more to the pile as we go along. Thanks for bearing with us.

Dowding Thomas

Re: Wednesday story on Maureen Dowd's return to the NY Times.

Dowd is back with all the force of the Terminator. And bless her young researcher for filling in any gaps in Hollywood lore that might exist in movie maven Dowd's remarkable collection of mental film clips. But what book has Dowd been pushing this time? And how many weeks is she allowed to take away the op-ed page to promote what a column fan might consider a lesser literary effort?

Wes Pedersen
Chevy Chase, MD

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Electronic Broadsheets

Mr. Marsh and E&P editors: I read your ?Shoptalk? column (March 7, on electronic newsprint) with interest, but also some dismay.

I?m the managing editor of the Columbia Missourian?s eMprint editions; the Missourian is the newspaper published by the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. eMprint is a new digital publishing platform that is a blend of print and the Web, which repurposes newspaper content into an 8.5x11-inch rich-media PDF which subscribers can download. So I?ve done some thinking about electronic newspaper technology.

E-ink has some interesting technology. We've even talked to them very briefly about doing something related to eMprint. But the entire paradigm this article's talking about rests on the idea that a broadsheet-sized appliance is the best possible way to view a newspaper. Which drives me up the wall.

Realistically, the important part of a viewscreen is that it replicate text and pictures; be light, durable and reliable; and be constantly updatable. The size is completely irrelevant to the functionality.

Who, exactly, has "broadsheet" down on their list of favorite sizes of reading material? The reason newspapers are broadsheets isn't because of any inherent reading advantage; it's due to web printing technology and the whims of the pulp and paper companies.

Before web technology -- meaning printing from continuous rolls of newsprint, not the electronic Web -- newspapers used presses that printed one single sheet at a time. As those presses got fancier in the 1870s and 1880s, multiple copies of those single sheets could be printed at once. Copies of full typecases were made through a process called "stereotyping." But the bottleneck was folding pages and inserting sections, which meant it made sense to increase the size, hence reducing the number, of pages. Thus the "standard" size of the broadsheet.

But, wait, I forgot: There's no standard "broadsheet" size. I'll have to use one width to read the Columbia Missourian, one to read the New York Times and one to read the Wall Street Journal. Because they all use different web widths. Oops, I hope they thought of that.

Publishers love this idea because it implies that they can just port over a version of the newspaper straight from the tubes in the newsroom to the electronic screen. But some people like me would argue that it makes more sense to be platform-agnostic and to redesign or repurpose news so it can be easily seen on viewing devices. Of course, that would mean more time and more labor costs.

My only hope is that they make the electronic viewscreens absorbent. Then I can still use them for changing oil or training the dog. (I suppose whacking the dog with it is right out.) Then again, maybe it would be better to make them water-resistant so I can use it as an improvised umbrella when it rains. (I?m being facetious here, of course.)

I think that some sort of e-ink technology could be extraordinarily useful for publishers, and readers, in the future. But I really hope that we don?t get stuck on one size of screen ? because all that means is that we?ll remain stuck in one paradigm of what newspapers should be.

Rob Weir
Columbia, MO

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Highly Evolved?

Re: Your Wednesday story on Gallup poll finding 53% of Americans believe in the bible view of evolution.

Do you think if the American press didn't use terms like "our saviour"
around Christmas time and Easter, and if the American press reported on what a mishmash of texts the 'bible' is, and if the American press made clear that Constantine created the 'bible' as it exists today, that
Americans would still be so idiotic? How about a little mention of the
age of the universe and how we know so many things about evolution and what exactly a scientific theory is? All we get is sports-style
coverage, with no facts, let alone any analysis.

I get so weary of watching everyone play along with the worship of
nothing. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams hoped we'd be so over this by now, and I think our press is a huge reason we're not.

Laurie Badley
homeschooling mom