[Ipg-smz] [Ipg-l] Roll out the red carpet for... Mark Brownstein

[Stephen Satchell]

And the job of the copy editors was to take "words" and fit them into
"lines", which relates to the column-inch mention by Lynn.

In hot composition, mismatches between the story real estate and the
news hole was made up by one or more tricks, such as the one- or
two-line pithy quotes that would show up randomly at the bottom of a
news story -- couldn't have an island of white on the page.

Cold composition has a little more latitude, because you were pasting
columns of text onto a backing board, so there were nice tricks you
could do using a sharp Xacto knife.

Electronic composition (full-page plate-making) let people jigger a
story's text to come out "right".  That depended on your composition
system being able to H&J in real time, as opposed to batch.

(The "cost" of such capability paid for improvements in line
orphan-widow control, as well as providing a tool to fight the "river of
white" that would appear from time to time.)

For one client, I always gave them about 103% of their requested word
count so that they could cut to fit, and *not* call for more "filler".
The stuff was paid by the piece, so no one thought I was trying for more
money.

On 10/2/19 11:25 AM, Christine Hall via Ipg-smz wrote:
> Much tighter writing. 800 words meant 790-810 words, not 700-900 words.
> 
> Christine Hall
> Publisher & Editor
> FOSS Force: Keeping tech free
> http://fossforce.com
> 
> On 10/2/19 11:10 AM, Lynn Greiner via Ipg-smz wrote:
>> Word counts and column inches .... what fun! Led to some very creative
>> editing (and often much tighter writing).