Media Watch

Ban Pink

Local weeklies discover way to make reading difficult
Dark pink newsprint annoys subscribers, defeats purpose

By Walter Brooks.

Many years ago when I worked for The Cape Codder, I wrote what I hoped was a humorous, tongue-in-cheek column proposing to set up a local non-profit to work toward the outlawing of the use of the color pink on Cape Cod houses.

The organization's proposed name was "Ban Pink, Inc."

That was decades ago when the best and the brightest were eager to become newspaper men and women.  Today those left in the business don't know how to use a very pale shade of pink ink to make a statement without obscuring the entire publication when they want to call attention to an event by using that color.

Those of you who still subscribe to one of the GateHouse newspapers printed in Massachusetts discovered the truth of that statement this week when a benighted executive at GateHouse had all his newspapers printed on a fairly dark shade of pink newsprint which of course cut down greatly the contrast between the type and its background making reading the newspaper a chore rather than a pleasure.

The publisher's face should be red, not his reader's faces in the photos

No one suggests that GateHouse not help promote breast cancer awareness. The issue is the incompetence of those who do not know how to do that without making the very stories they wish to promote more difficult to read.

And why GateHouse feels it can drastically alter the appearance of all its paid ads this way and still expect to be paid for them simply boggles the mind.

In the past the executive making these decisions would have known how much easier and less expensive it would have been to use a pale shade of pink ink on the front page and features dealing with breast cancer awareness without covering the photos and ads and everything else in the process.

No one suggests that GateHouse not help promote breast cancer awareness. The issue is the incompetence of those who do not know how to do that without making the very stories they wish to promote more difficult to read.

And the old media wonders why the are losing readers.

This stupidity is coupled by a reduction in  the type size of the newspaper's body text.

I recall a time in the 1970s when newspapers were experimenting with various type sizes as well.

Then it wasn't a case of cramming more words into the ever diminishing pages of newspapers as is the case today, but a effort to discover what type size readers found most comfortable to read.

When the industry came to a conclusion, the then-publisher of The Cape Codder Malcolm Hobbs, increased his newspaper type size a little larger still because he knew a significant portion of his readers were retired and probably needed a larger type size to read his newspaper with ease.

The Cape Codder's paid circulation rose in double digits annually back then as well and topped at over 16,000 before the newspaper was sold to what is GateHouse media today.

Malcolm's Rhode's 19 sloop had a quarterboard on the stern which read "Sic transom," a play on the Latin phrase "Sic transit gloria mundi" or "so passes the glory of this world".

Today he would have changed it to "Sic transit gloria media."