Newsletter wars redux

[Paul]

I've mentioned before that at work I produce a newsletter that was essentially a dog's breakfast, only less well-organized. It began as a compilation of what would have been the separate newsletters of three or four different organizations with overlapping constituencies, and for eleventeen years or so it was just that: a compilation of columns, announcements, and ads, with no editorial oversight beyond proofreading. Despite that, representatives of the various organizations sometimes asserted the right to revise or veto one another's content.

After a realignment of the organizations, I obtained full authority to edit the newsletter, including a modest redesign. In the redesign the typeface changed from Arial (no one had ever thought about using anything else) to BT Latin 725 (Méridien). To my great surprise, people can tell the difference and even distinguish between it and Times New Roman. Ordinarily when I refer to a difference between typefaces the people involved in this look at me as if I were speaking Klingon.

The bigger, and more difficult, change is that the new format allows publishing actual news articles. The difficult part is extracting any news from the other organizations. They are used to bunging everything into a random list of "announcements" as if nothing were more important than any other thing, and having it all written by the office staff, who usually had very little information or interest.