Picture that your community-sized daily paper, which you joined just recently out of necessity, it not being "your" community until you moved there after being downsized elsewhere, is bought from its family owner by a small chain.
Picture the new chain's nearest paper is less than 40 miles away, in a community and county somewhat bigger but not too much. Picture the managing editor of your paper is bumped to publisher. Picture the publisher of the next paper over figures he'll take this new publisher under both the publishing and editorial wing of his.
With me?
Picture the next-door publisher has what he thinks are some great design ideas.
Picture that ...
He doesn't always practice what he preaches at his own paper, and you have the publisher as "projectionist."
Not the movie-theater guy. The Freudian psychological projectionist.
Next-door publisher thinks you should always have a vertical picture on the front page.
Problem? A 12-issue sample of front pages, riffing through issues at the next-door town's library, says he broke that one-third of the time.
Yes, it's a small sample. But, it's not tiny, let alone infinitesimal.
The projectionist.
Other things? Yes, it might be nice to run less AP content. Or it might not. And, it would be easier to do that with one more editorial person. And with a half-point bigger font that looked like wider Century Schoolbook or similar, rather than Times, to boot. And with all stories run ragged right. And on a narrower web.
And, with a five-column double deck header on the front page (yes!) that ... looked like ass or something.
The projectionist.
Nuff ced for now.
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