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player ready...Whenever the presidential election is decided, newspapers and magazines finally will be able to declare–presumably with certainty this time–that either Vice President Al Gore or Texas Gov. George W. Bush is the next president of the United States.
They won’t have to rely on editorial fallback positions, such as Time magazine’s observation that the undecided election is “the first draft of history,” or Newsweek’s artful cover illustration melding the right side of Gore’s face to the left side of Bush’s, headlined: “The Winner is …” Even the satirical Onion, whose post-election headline was “Bush or Gore: `A New Era Dawns,'” eventually will know whom to poke fun at over the next four years.
That’s one of the conveniences of journalism. There’s always another deadline–tomorrow, next week, next month.
Such maneuverability does not exist at World Book Encyclopedia, whose editors quickly realized they had a serious problem last week when Wednesday morning’s electoral impasse dragged into Thursday and Friday and beyond. Fifteen volumes of the encyclopedia’s 22-volume set have to be updated with information based on the knowledge that Bush or Gore had been elected. Time was running out on the initial 50,000-set print run as the legal entanglements surrounding the recount thickened.
“We realized we had an issue two days after the election,” said Michael Ross, executive vice president and publisher at World Book Inc. “We promised delivery by Christmas time. … We promised it would be there under the tree.”
It was not as though the Chicago-based publisher could afford the network television luxury of getting it wrong–twice–and then correcting the mistake later. World Book sells about 100,000 sets of the printed encyclopedia annually, and most households make that $799 purchase only once, Ross said.
The solution: Printing an individual volume on the election and all of its implications. The 160-page volume will be put together when the election is finalized, Ross said, and buyers of the 22-volume set will be mailed the new election volume, free, when it is completed.
“This merits a special edition,” Ross said, adding it will cost the company about $200,000. “That’s a meaningful amount of money, but compared to the service we’re providing with this, it’s meaningless. We have to do this.
“I see it as an investment,” he said.
Regional venture shuttered: The Wall Street Journal pulled the plug Wednesday on its six weekly regional editions, saying the sections “no longer make economic sense.” Paul Steiger, the Journal’s managing editor, said in a memo that the costs of producing the sections, launched in 1993, were no longer justified.
“We concluded that people, space and other resources involved were better devoted to national news and national advertising,” Steiger said in the memo to staff members.
The regional sections were produced in Texas, Florida, California, the Southeast, Northwest and New England. Steiger said the choice was between building the regional editions to cover at least 48 states or shutting them down.
Thirty-four jobs will be eliminated. Steiger said those affected will be given time to pursue other job opportunities inside the Journal and parent company Dow Jones & Co., or elsewhere.
Asked if this decision makes a statement about the future of regional advertising, Dow Jones spokesman Richard Tofel said it does not.
Vox populi: The jury is still out on the future of CBS-Ch. 2’s 10 p.m. newscast, but a little more than two weeks after Channel 2 and solo anchor Carol Marin abruptly parted company, the ratings for its new, two-headed approach to news is drawing identical ratings to a similar format a year ago. That’s the reading on ratings numbers from Nielsen Media Research.
Overnight figures from Nielsen–through the first 13 days of the current sweeps ratings period–Channel 2 reported a 6.3 rating, the same as in November 1999, before Marin took over. Overall, the ratings improvement at Channel 2 halts a 34-percent ratings slide that began in February.
And the Nielsen numbers also show that more people are sticking around to watch the second half of Channel 2’s 10 p.m. newscast. But what does all this mean? That’s unclear. NBC-Ch. 5 and ABC-Ch. 7 also are reporting gains in audience over the same time period, perhaps because of interest in the presidential election. So, with two weeks remaining in the November ratings season, drawing conclusions from these numbers is as risky as interpreting Florida exit polling data.