Subject: Tangent about why TV listings are wrong
From: barb@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Barb Miller)
Date: 1991-04-25, 08:11
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks
Reply-to: barb@zurich.ai.mit.edu

This started as an e-mail message that bounced.  My apologies if this
is unnecessary net-clutter:

In response to: jms@vanth.UUCP (Jim Shaffer)... 

You recently wrote:

   I'd say someone screwed up again.  Or actually just followed their normal
   practice of putting the things together about three weeks in advance.  But
   I'd call that screwing up.  In this age of computers, there is NO
   conceivable excuse in my philosophy for such a long lead time.

Yes, we all know about how wonderful computers are.  In fact, most
large newspapers have been in the "age of computers" since the mid to
late 1970's, which is when their systems date from.  Having spent a
number of years working for a company (Atex) that built many of those
systems and consequently visited a number of newspaper sites, I can
offer a few words of explanation, which may not count as an excuse to
you.  Do these TV listings have color pages?  Those neat graphic
prime-time-at-a-glance pages that show a whole evening?  With the
composition languages available on the older publishing systems, TV
listings are complicated enough to do that they are actually laid out
by hand at many papers, making the TV page in a daily, along with the
comics, one of the few pages that are not automated.  Having color
requires a special print run when the presses aren't being used for
the daily spewing out of normal pages on deadline.  Either that or all
the color is sent out and done somewhere else, along with the
advertising inserts and the comic pages.

Why don't they do something about this?  It's just not cost effective.
If only a tiny percentage of what goes into those listings is likely
to change in a week or two, and those changes can be corrected in a
daily paper for the evening in question (not that it always is,
granted), newspapers can't justify the expense of tying up their
systems (or their composing rooms) which are on deadline for other
issues of the paper in order to avoid those few discrepancies.

Why don't they modernize their systems?  Well, they're starting to,
but not everything they need is there yet, and they're very squeezed
for advertising revenue, being in competition with CNN and all, so
they're holding off, or putting their efforts into using their
computers to direct their advertising into specific zones of the area
they serve, etc., or putting in more highly designed, early-run pages
(like the Food Section) to help them compete with magazines.

I don't know whether this is an excuse or not, but I hope it explains
it.

Barb Miller