Does effective communication exist between the newsroom and the graphics department?
How often are facts in the story and the graphic contradictory? Do photos and graphics support similar geographic perspectives? Are stories missing graphics they should have? Do headlines and text in stories correspond accurately with text and headlines in graphics? Soon after I took the job as assistant managing editor for graphics at The Detroit News, I received a call from my boss, Bob Giles, the publisher and editor. He was responding to my request for visual writers. “Are you sure you know what youre doing?” he asked. “You are asking to replace three members of your graphics staff with word people. I don’t see the necessity for this considering we have a newsroom full of reporters who are capable of writing appropriate text for graphics assigned to their stories. Why are you doing this?” My goal was to make The Detroit News a more visual newspaper. At that time, about a year after Gannett purchased the paper from the Evening News, there were 22 people in my department. They were a
