Several readers have commented of late that we seem increasingly fond of splashing large photographs or graphics across a double-page spread, only to have portions of them disappear down the gutter (technical term for the centre margins).
Patrick Fagan is the latest to complain: “I do enjoy Feedback and the interaction with staff and readers. But to my recollection no one has written to you on the subject of the splitting of photos, maps etc across a spread. One of the advantages, supposedly, of moving to tabloid format was being able to read one side of the double page at a time. Yet in every edition fine photographs are printed across the double spread, requiring a full opening to see them properly. Very rarely can they not be fitted on to one page, enhancing their appreciation by the viewer. So why is this done?”
This calls for some more interaction with staff, in the shape of the design editor, Jon Hill: “When we devote a spread — or, as in recent weeks, a number of spreads — to big subjects such as the Arab Spring uprisings or the disaster in Japan, we try to unite the pages visually by taking an image, or a group of images, across the gutter. We take great care to avoid any vital detail of an image being ‘lost’ in the fold (like an eye or the focal part of an image), but this is often the best way to create drama and scale with the use of photography. Most of our pages are burdened (or blessed) with advertising, so these opportunities are rare. When we get a clear spread we try to make the most of it.”
Of course, accurate printing, folding and page trimming are critical to the success or failure of spreading photos and graphics over the gutter, but the vast improvements in production quality at our present printworks mean that we don’t have to cross our fingers nearly as often as we used to.
As a footnote, on March 21 we used both the front and back pages as a double-page spread to show one image from Libya, and Tony Phillips wrote: “I would like to register admiration for your audacious double front page that allowed Jack Hill’s superbly observed photograph to make the absolutely stunning impact that it did. It almost literally took my breath away, such was its power. It was a living embodiment of the often quoted, but never more tellingly illustrated, dictum that a picture is worth a thousand words. Congratulations to everyone involved.”
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Anarchy or thuggery?
Robin Thompson wrote on Tuesday: “Whenever a demonstration occurs, it is your writers’ current custom to refer to disruption by so-called ‘anarchists’ (for example, page 7 today, ‘Anarchists may disrupt royal wedding, police admit’). This seems to have become an emotive derogatory term synonymous with old-fashioned ‘communists’, who were once the cause of every evil in our society. Since anarchism is a coherent political philosophy expounded by Kropotkin and Tolstoy in the 19th century and by Noam Chomsky in our day, is this term entirely appropriate in the context of a demonstration to refer to mere hooligans and thugs?
“An anarchist in my dictionary is someone who advocates ‘a harmonious condition of society in which government is abolished as unnecessary’. Have the people who have been arrested on recent demonstrations been advocates of such an ideal? I hardly think so. Use of political terms as insults is what they do well in Iran and North Korea.”
Most of us are familiar with the maxim that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, and these days too one policeman’s legitimate protester is another policeman’s unruly anarchist. It has been a derogatory term for some time: my Collins defines it as “a person who causes disorder or upheaval”, hence its widespread use in the media. Another case of language evolving, however much the purists and Chomskyites among us may wish it did not.
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Uniformly mistaken
Last Saturday’s Magazine feature on the fake royal wedding caught the jaundiced eye of Simon Lanyon, ex-corporal, RAF: “I may be missing the deliberate irony but who was responsible for ‘William’s’ RAF uniform — The Times or the National Theatre? William is not yet a wing commander; RAF officers don’t wear blue shirts and ties; they don’t wear mock aiguillettes (front cover) apparently filched from the curtains of one of the more traditional theatres, and above all they don’t wear caps of aircraftmen, they wear officers’ caps. Apart from that, Caitlin Moran’s piece was quite fun.” Look, we’re not made of money — I expect it was the best the Times am-dram props cupboard could come up with.
An editorial palaver
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Alan Hendry e-mails: “I noticed in last Saturday’s Feedback that you referred to proprietor and editor-in-chief entirely in lower case, yet there was a capital E (twice) in Editor. I appreciate that the position of editor of The Times carries with it a great deal of prestige but essentially it’s still just a job title. Is the capital E just something that has been insisted upon by successive editors as a form of self-aggrandisement?” It has long been Times style to cap up our own boss, and while Mr Hendry is free to speculate on the reason why, I couldn’t possibly comment.
He spotted something else: “Incidentally, a reader’s letter in that same edition’s Money pages had the headline ‘Pensions palava’. What’s a palava? My dictionary certainly doesn’t acknowledge it as an alternative spelling of palaver.” Mine neither. No column next week as I’m taking a break; see you on April 16.