Greening

John McPhee, writing in 2015 in The New Yorker, about the process of being edited at Time magazine:

After four days of preparation and writing—after routinely staying up almost all night on the fourth night—and after tailoring your stories past the requests, demands, fine tips, and incomprehensible suggestions of the M.E. and your senior editor, you came in on Day 5 and were greeted by galleys from Makeup with notes on them that said “Green 5” or “Green 8” or “Green 15” or some such, telling you to condense the text by that number of lines or the piece would not fit in the magazine. You were supposed to use a green pencil so Makeup would know what could be put back, if it came to that. I can’t remember it coming to that.

McPhee quotes Calvin Trillin—a colleague at both Time and The New Yorker—on this process of “greening”:

I don’t have any interest in word games—I don’t think I’ve ever done a crossword or played Scrabble—but I found greening a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle. I was surprised that what I had thought of as a tightly constructed seventy-line story—a story so tightly constructed that it had resisted the inclusion of that maddening leftover fact—was unharmed, or even improved, by greening ten per cent of it. The greening I did in Time Edit convinced me that just about any piece I write could be improved if, when it was supposedly ready to hand in, I looked in the mirror and said sternly to myself “Green fourteen” or “Green eight.” And one of these days I’m going to begin doing that.

When I worked in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner in the early 1990s, the author was cut right out of this process of trimming articles for space: it happened as the newspaper was being made up, in a dialog between an editor and a printer, standing in front of the full page in question, as it was being assembled.

Stories typed by writers into old-style terminals in the newsroom came out of the Compugraphic typesetting machine in the composing room on long strips of photographic paper. We printers waxed the backs of these strips—using a clever machine that applied hot wax to one side and not the other—and then sliced them up into newspaper-column-sized chunks. 

With an editor by our side, working from a rough sketch of the page they brought out with them, we’d start to assemble the editorial copy around the ads that had previously been placed. Headline first, sometimes a subhead, and then the copy for each story.

The copy-fitting process was inexact enough—more of a “this many words takes up roughly this much space”—that, inevitably, either parts of the story would need to be trimmed (literally: we’d cut out sentences with a knife), or space added by increasing the line spacing in later paragraphs (again with a knife).

Compared to the precision of today’s digital tools, this “real time greening” process makes it seem wondrous that this is how newspapers were made up well into my adulthood.