Frankenstein Edition

11/18/2013 - 14h13

Those who pick up a copy of Folha on Saturday begin to doubt whether printed publications really are in a crisis. There are sections which seem to never end, extra supplements, and special reports, which readers should find pleasing, but instead they lead to lots of complaints.

"It is irritating to have to organize sections 1, 2, 3 of each topic, all of them with huge ads. I don't want to be forced to leaf through the whole newspaper to find what interests me," said José Luiz Dias, 62, a sales manager in São Paulo.

In fact, the sections come out of order. "Politics 2" appears after "Sports," while "Daily News 2" is distant from "Daily News 1," and readers who manage to find the "Folhinha" section for children should win a lollipop.

The order of the sections is related to the printing deadlines. The presses can't run the whole newspaper at night. The "Culture" section and supplements start printing in the afternoon, and for this reason, if a famous artist dies at 4 in the afternoon, the obituary comes out in the "Daily News" or "World News" section.

The main section, "Business," "Daily News" and "Sports" are the hot sections which have their deadlines at 9 p.m. for the national edition and midnight for São Paulo, and these sections can be changed up until midnight. But there is a limit to the numbers of pages in the final press run. When the amount of ads is huge, they create second sections, which are printed at 7 p.m.

The print edition is assembled manually: "Business 2," "Daily News 2" and "World News 2" are printed together, forming a bloc. Putting each one into the ideal sequence, in other words, following "Business 1," "Daily News 1," "and World News 1," respectively, would delay delivery of the newspaper.

Besides impeding readers, the artificial division of topics leads to mistakes in editing. Related topics which belong together on the same page end up in different sections. It also leads to minor topics getting stretched out to fill the pages that are printed early, while more important news gets the short shrift.

For readers, there is the difficulty of finding stories in a sea of ads. Counting only the ads which occupy entire pages, on October 26, there were 82 pages of ads out of a total of 154 (53%, without counting the monthly guide to books, music and films). In the main section, defined by a reader as "the newspaper's soul," there were 17 full-page ads on only 24 pages.

"The amount of ads is abusive, which is unworthy of the newspaper. It seems that they are more concerned about money than readers. This is a lack of good sense," criticized physician Hélio Teixeira, 69, who gets Folha in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais state.

Hélio, like other readers, suggested that ads for real estate and cars be concentrated in the classified section, but the fact is that advertisers seek placement in what they consider the newspaper's most highly regarded main sections.

Yesterday's edition was smaller due to a holiday, but the Saturday before last was a good example of the "Frankenstein newspaper," which, gigantic and poorly finished, could turn into a problem for its creator.

Stories about the economy were spread throughout three sections. Despite one of them being about China, the news that the country's exports are recovering went in another section. An enormous photograph of a solitary cyclist in Guangzhou illustrated the text, while bicycle sales were not mentioned in the story.

"World News 2" had big stories about irrelevant topics, such as Venezuelan manufacturers making mannequins with bigger curves, the problems of raising horses in Fukushima and the Peruvian Air Force looking into flying saucers.

"Politics 2" looked into the "Light for All" program, practically repeating what was published in March.

It would be ingenuous to imagine that a newspaper would turn down ads at a time when the future of printed newspapers looks so gloomy. But it is necessary to discuss some limits and, at the same time, invest in the newsroom with the goal of improving the quality of the "little monsters" produced on Saturday.

Translated by JOHN WRIGHT

Read the article in the original language