Farewell paste-up department, which has sat empty and dark for most of the years I’ve been here. It’s a relic of another time, when what appeared in print came not from a computer screen, but from a printed out column of text, hot-waxed to a page before it was photographed and sent to the printers. It seems a sad demolition anyway.
And it seems ironic, too, considering the glitch in the new system that lays out the paper keeps kicking back to older comic strips as the pages get sent to the printer. Apparently it’s been a huge source of frustration for the desk, and around the newsroom, it’s been a frustration for the number of phone calls from readers who are piping mad and saying how horrible the paper is because of the repeated comics. I get it, but still. I don’t think our readers’ level of frustration with repeated comics comes anywhere close to the frustration level of the desk peeps trying to fix the problem.
At any rate, I doubt this was much of a problem when the paper was laid out by the paste-up department. Computers aren’t always better than people.
