Dan’s Papers December 10, 2010 danshamptons.com Page 17
MiniThumbs, etc.
The Language of Publishing and Editing at Dan’s Papers By Dan Rattiner If you come into the office at Dan’s Papers on certain days, particularly on Tuesdays, when this newspaper goes to press, you might think you have gone to a foreign country. We talk to each other in a completely unique language—and only we understand it. “I need the minithumbs,’’ I might say. This would be a request to the production manager for a print out of the newspaper in miniature thumbnail form. There are 16 pages on a single piece of paper. You can’t read the body copy. But you can see the headlines and the locations of the photographs and the ads. The minithumbs are, well, the minithumbs. As opposed to the “thumbnails,’’ which consist of four pages on a single piece of paper. “This is a SouthO,’’ I might say to my assistant, Sharon. Or “This is a shoptil,’’ to Maria
Tennariello who does the Shop ‘Til You Drop’ column. Tricia Rayburn assembles the South O’ the Highway column. Many letters to the editor come into the paper. We shuffle them around as AskDan. “HiRes’’ sounds like something from the Shinnecock Indian Reservation, but it refers to the best way for us to receive photos at the newspaper, in High Resolution. “LowRes’’ means you get it faster and can look at it, but it is not of a quality to use. “Can you get out of the front?’’ is a question you would ask a productioneer who is sitting at their computer laying out or proofreading an article—such as this one—that will appear in the front of the newspaper. If you need to get “in’’ there, you need to get the productioneer “out’’ because the software program can only accept instructions from one person at a time. The pro-
ductioneer, by the way, (productioneers do not wear mouse ears or anything,) works in Quark, or Photoshop, which, of coures, are the names of software programs used to assemble a newspaper. A prospective productioneer is almost always asked “Do you know Quark?’’ and if the answer is to ask who that might be, we politely show them the door. Anyway, on Tuesday, you will surely hear the word “closing,’’ as in, “I’m sorry but they are busy closing,’’ referring to all the productioneers. You close a newspaper just as you close a show or close a door. Then the production manager gets busy “transmitting.’’ Which, in this amazing age, means sending the data that is the newspaper, a billion bytes of it, by computer over 100 miles to a printer in another state. When the paper is 300 pages, it could take a couple of hours. (continued on page 28)
TINY CREATURES TO GOBBLE A POND CLEAN? By Dan Rattiner Years ago, when I was a teenager living the Hamptons, one of my favorite places to go was Mill Pond in Water Mill. I had a friend who had a house on a road along the south shore of it. His was the only home on it at the time, a big threestory affair with turrets on the roof, way down at the dead end. All the rest of the land along the pond was woods and sticker bushes, but he had a rowboat on the shore at one point near his house and we could walk down to it and row out and go fishing or swimming out there in the sunshine. At 92 acres, it’s not a particularly big body of water. But besides large mouth bass, it was home to all sorts of species of birds, including herons, egrets and ospreys. It was a perfectly wonderful place to spend an afternoon.
As time went by, scores of other people, mostly city people, came and purchased property on the shoreline. They cleared the land—something my friend Ron Ziel did not do—and put in magnificent lawns and gardens, along with many exotic bushes and trees from foreign lands. The employees of the landscaping companies could be seen there every day, planting, fertilizing, spraying and mowing, keeping everything in tip top shape and well groomed. Small algae blooms soon appeared. Scientists were called in. It was determined that nitrogen and other chemicals that are used in high end landscaping were leeching down the front lawns of these homes during rainstorms and fouling the pond. Also, more nitrogen and other chemicals from nearby farms were surging down the
paved roads and driveways of these homes directly into the ponds. Nobody did anything. The algae blooms got worse. Last week, a meeting was held at the Water Mill Community House where public officials and others were invited to hear a presentation entitled “Remedy for Our Choking Ponds,” headed up by Steve Abrahamson, who is co-chair of a group known as Friends of Lake Nowedonah. It seems that Mill Pond is just a mess of algae and other crap now. Has been for about five years. It’s a horror to look out at. And certainly nobody could swim in it. What was a group called the Friends of Lake Nowedonah doing running a meeting about Mill Pond? Although the pond remains a pond and it (continued on page 22)