tribune tour no.3 on. ofthe pr at the tribun.onetone and color rotogravure. and the graphic section...

TRIBUNE TOUR NO.3The Story Behind Your

Sunday PaperINYOURHANDS and before

your eyes is one of the fromnine to a dozen different and

distinct sections of today's Chi·cago Sunday Tribune.Scattered about you in your

home or wherever you may beare the other sections, on table,chair, or fioor, or in the handsof others, in most cases memobers of your family. This is afamily newspaper, so, of course,others of your household areas much interested in it as your-self.The Sunday Tribune, as you

can see and as you have knownever since you have been read-ing it, is much more compre-hensive than The Daily Tribune,the production of which hasbeen described in two previousarticles of this series. It is morethan news, more than editorialopinion. It is a weekly un-abridged presentation of every-thing under the sun to inform,instruct, and entertain readersof the widest variety of Inter-ests.The Sunday Tribune includes,

in addition to the news, sports,and financial sections regularlyfound in the daily paper:A complete section of from

ten to sixteen pages of comicsin four colors.A section devoted to classified

advertising, which makes prof-itable reading.A Metropolitan Section de-

voted in the main to eommu-nity news.A Woman's Section.A Society and Travel Section.A Drama and Movies Section.A Picture Section done in both

one tone and color rotogravure.And the Graphic Section in

monotone and color rotogra-vure, which you are at themoment reading.As you peruse these sections

the thought may not enteryour mind that you are enjoy-ing the assembled product ofhun d red s of professionalwriters, editors, and artists, ofan army of mechanical experts,and' of tons and tons of the mostingenious machines that thepublishing business ever has de-vised. Such, however, is thecase, whether you realize it ornot.The Sunday Tribune, contrary

to -what some may believe, isnot created merely by those whoproduce the daily paper, but bynearly all of these of the dailypaper, supplemented by distinctorganizations that work entire-ly upon the Sunday editions.Two special and separate edt-

torial stars, apart from the reg-ular newsroom staf discussed ina previous article, are neces-sary to accomplish the editorialwork required for the featuresections of the Sunday paper.One of these two is concernedonly with the production of theMetropol1tan Section, of whichthere are five separate editionsthat cover the news of five dif-ferent parts of Chicago and itssuburban area.The other of the two distinct

editorial stars is that of theSunday department, which isresponsible for the productionof the comic section, the wom-an's section, the drama andmovies section, the society andtravel sections, the picture sec-tion, and the Graphic Section.Contributions from the various

departmental writers, such asthe drama critic, the musiccritic, and a score of othershave places in the Sundayfeature sections. In fact, theentire newsroom personnel is atthe disposal of the managingeditor in producing the Sundaypaper.The Sun day department,

under the direction of the Sun-day editor, is quartered on thefourth floor of Tribune Tower,adjacent to the editbrial art de-partment and connected by acorridor with the main news-room. Its star, not counting anumber of departmental writ-ers who have desks in the Sun-day department's offices, andwho write for both the dailyand Sunday paper, containstwenty-seven members, seven-teen of whom are women andgirls. These include editors,writers, assistants, and secre-taries.The Metropolitan department

also is quartered on the fourthfloor of the tower. Its stat,under the leadership of theMetropolitan editor, numbersfourteen. These include editors,reporters, secretaries, and onephotographer.

• • •What surely must impress

you as you turn from section tosection of your Sunday Tribuneis its amazing abundance ofcolor.The Daily Tribune, as you

know, features color printing,especially in the form of fullpages of color advertisments,but it is in the Sunday editionsthat you get full measure ofcolor in editorial as well as ad-vertising pages.Color is The Tribune's chal-

lenge to what may be for manyan otherwise colorless world oran otherwise drab existence..Color is music to the eye justas a swing band or a symphonyorchestra is music to the ear.Color is The Tribune's answer

to a depression and a recession.In many ways The Tribune hasdefeated these two arch ene-mies of prosperity by the unre-stricted employment of color,banished public spending hesi-tancy, and kept virtually all ofits machinery and all of its menand women busy during timesof unprecedented unemploy-ment. It requires many moreworkers to produce a.paper rea-turing color than to produce oneprinted only in black and white.Every page of four-color work,for example, calls for four sepa-rate mats from the stereotypedepartment and metal castsfrom this department in multi-ples of four. Virtually allthrough the Tribune plant, ina similar manner, color workprovides for additional employ-ment - m 0 r e photographers,more artists, more engravers,more pressmen, and so on.Color's appeal is to the eye

as well as to the intellect,whereas black and white print-ing's appeal is mainly to theintellect.Color, therefore, is the only

medium by which the artistryof a fine painting or a splendidvari-colored illustration can beconveyed.Color therefore is the zenith

of forceful and attractive ad-vertising.

Th. new color cam.ra in the color engrcnoingdepartm.nt. Th. c:irc:ularscre.n can take in a full newspaper pag. in a single .xposur ••

Since the Graphic Section,which presents color producedand printed by the rotogravureprocess, is the newest of TheSunday Tribune's feature sec-tions, it shall be discussed first.The Tribune, as many will re-

member, has had magazine sec-tions in the past that have beenprinted in part in color. But itwas only when the Graphic Sec-tion was launched in early au-tumn in 1931, as part of aprogram of completely modern-izing The Tribune, that the firstpronouncedly dUJerent Sundaymagazine supplement came intobeing. We wish that we couldinclose in this edition a sampleof that firs~ Graphic Section, sothat you could see what prog-ress has been made in sevenyears. Yet the Graphic Sectionof 1931, so different from thestandard magazines of' thestandard newspaper, was' a sue-cess from the start.It was during the bleak days

of the depression that The Trib-une decided to reach out withnew appeals to its readers, im-prove its entire paper, and putit so far ahead of other news-papers that there would be leftno grounds for comparison. ASunday magazine would help dothis, so the Graphic Section-originally called the GraphicWeekly-was born. .At first it was printed on the

relatively slow speed of theComic Section's presses and itscolor pages were produced in themanner of the comics. Becausethese presses were busy most ofthe time printing those funny se-quences that entertain the wholefamily, only a limited numberof the Graphic Weeklies could

Cartoonist Chest.r Gould preparing a ••Dick Tracy" page for the SundayComic S.ction.

be printed each week. Thesewere not circulated in the strict-ly city editions.But so popular in reader in-

terest was the Graphic Weeklythat it was decided to put it inall of the editions of the Sundaypaper. This necessitated print-ing on the high-speed pressesthat turn out the daily and mostof the sections of the Sundaypaper. The Graphic, therefore,was increased in page. size andin number of pages, and com-bined with the drama sectionunder the name of Graphic Sec-tion.Obviously the next move, if

the Graphic Section were to beimproved still further, would bethe printing of it in rotogravure.So on April 18, 1937, it was sep-arated from the drama sectionand produced alone-still theGraphic Section - in rotogra-vure, its front and back pages incolor rotogravure.

• • •The Graphic Section repre-

sents development based upona profound study of what peo-ple want to look at and whatthey want to read. It featuresan unlimited variety of sub-jects, historical, biographical;scientific, and what not. It con-tains regular features weekly,such as a part of a page devotedto dogs, another to movies, apopular science department, anaviation department, a beautydepartment, a food department,and a halt page, more or less,of W. E. Hill's cartoons.For its Graphic articles The

Tribune not only employs a starof feature writers, but it ·alsodraws upon its other writersand reporters and its corre-spondents, both in this countryand abroad. In addition, it eon-tracts to: special articles fromoutside sources, by men andwomen with reputations in theliterary world. In the editorialart department are artists who

are employed almost exclu-sively on work for the GraphicSection.Edited and prepared under.

the supervision of the Sundayeditor, who has daily confer-ences with the managing editorand the editor, the Graphic Sec-tion presents features the likeof which are to be found in noother publication. It was inthis section in October, 1935,that the first blasts were firedagainst the deadly and untilthe n unmentionable diseasesyphilis. In a series of descrip-tive and instructive articles inthe Graphic Section the cloak ofsecrecy was drawn back fromthis insidious scourge. Whatwas the direct result of thisfirst and a subsequent series ofarticles on syphilis in this see-tion?Today the whole nation open-

ly is battling to conquer thedisease!The Graphic Section has put

before the reading public in-numerable forgotten events ofhistory, dug out of obscuritythe truths of many an eventand episode of the making ofAmerica and many an intrigueof Europe's dramatic past that

D.T.loplng a color n.gati.. in thedarkroom of the color .ngrcnoing

d.partm.nt.

are far more interesting andthrilling than fiction. No othermagazine of general circulationprints as many maps as theGraphic Section. Many of theseare in color.The Graphic Section's famous

story of the Crusades, for ex-ample, gave readers a morequickly assimilated idea ofthose historic religious wars ofthe middle ages than could beobtained in any book or set· ofbooks, for the simple reasonthat the colored map which ac-companied it traced the routesof each of the Crusades-all onone map, whereas historicalatlases generally require threeor more maps for the purpose.The double page of pictures

in the Graphic Section does notin any way duplicate the typesof pictures reproduced in thePicture Section, although foreach of these sections photo-graphs are selected solely withthe aim of interesting readers.The Picture Section, like the

Graphic Section, is preparedunder the direction of the Sun-day editor. Printed in roto-gravure, it reproduces photo-graphs without losing any oftheir values. Page one of thesection always is in color-reoproductions of famous paint-ings, of appealing illustrations,of exclusive Tribune fashionphotographs, of exceptional re-sults obtained by the color cam-era. The inside pages of thesection, except those that carrycolor advertisments, are printedin single tone-sepia ink. Tochoose the photographs forthese pages a vast amount ofstudy and comparison is re-quired. Approximately 3,500photographs are consideredeach week in the selection ofsubjects for the Picture Section.The rich brown of the Picture

Section's monotone pages doesnot represent, however, TheTribune's first use of sepia ink.In 1914, before it began printingin rotogravure, The Tribune en-gaged the actress, Elsie Janis,to write about the then newdances and to pose for photo-graphs with which to illustrateher series. Sepia ink was used,because the white paper show-ing through the ink in variousproportions s i m u I ate d fieshtones.Long before that the Police

Gazette, which was given toillustrations of prize fightersand chorus girls, used pink pa-per to obtain the eft'ect of fleshtones. This old publication, be-cause of its reputation, gavesuch a bad name to the use of

pink paper that it has beenmore or less tabooed ever since,and "pink sheet" has becomea term of reproach .

• • •In The Tribune's rotogravure

plant at 427 East Ontario streetare produced the Picture Sec-tion and the Graphic Section, sofar as most of the mechanicalprocesses are concerned. Typefor these two sections is set inthe composing room of themain plant and proofs of thistype are made in the engravingdepartment of the main plant.Aside from this and the photo-graphic work done in The Trib-une's color studio, all mechanl-cal tasks for the two sectionsare performed in the rotogra-vure plant.The Tribune, as many readers

know, has been a pioneer inAmerican newspaper rotogra-vure work. The process of roto-gravure, which is an extremely

Ben Day cutilt at work.

complicated one, i n v 0 I vi n gprinting from a huge coppercovered cylinder with imagesetched in it rather than stand-ing out similar to type, as is thecase of ordinary zinc atchings,was invented in England in thenineties and perfected in Ger-many in 1910.Because there were no roto-

gravure presses made in Amer-ica at the time, The Tribuneshortly before the world warpurchased a press of this typein Germany. The vessel bring-ing the press to this countrywas in midocean when war wasdeclared. The press was landedsafely, but when it was assem-bled it was found that certainof its parts were missing. WithGerman shipping driven oft' thesea, there was no way to obtainthe missing parts, so Tribunemechanical experts set aboutthe task of making the pressoperate. They finally aecom-

On. of the pr..... at the Tribun.rot. plcmt runnln9 off color proofs

.f the Pictur. S.ctiOD.(Trlbuno photo •• )

plished their purpose by dupll-eating missing parts after theyhad learned every detail of thepress. But in the meantime theNew York Times began prtnt-ing in rotogravure. Had it notbeen for the delay caused by ~the war The Tribune wouldhave been the first newspaperin this country to print in roto-gravure.In color rotogravure printing,

however, The Tribune abso-lutely was the first. In fact, itwas The Tribune that madecolor rotogravure on a webpress possible. It developed theprocess and designed the firstnewspaper color rotogravurepress, beginning work on thisas early as 1919.On ~pril 9, 1922, it printed

the first color rotogravure, anadvertisment on the back pageof a tabloid sized section thendevoted to fiction. The nextweek it applied color rotogra-vure for the first time to edt-torial work, a front pageillustration of a story in thefiction section.Two years later-on April 6,

1924- The Tribune came outwith color rotogravure on a sec-tion of standard newspapersize, printing the front page ofthe Picture Section. On Feb. 3,1933, color rotogravure ap-peared in the then newly en-larged Picture Section (en-larged as to page depth). OnApril 18, 1937, as previouslystated, it appeared in theGraphic Section. The Tribunewas first in the world to printcolor rotogravure on a continu-ous roll of paper.In printing color by the roto-

gravure process a cop persheathed cylinder is engravedfor each color. In four colorprinting by this process onecylinder prints yellow, anotherprints red, and still anotherprints blue. The fourth eylfn-der prints in sepia ink what isknown as the key plate. Theweb of the paper passingthrough the press takes up thevarious colors in the order justnamed.In the etching department of

the rotogravure plant, underthe supervision of Gordon Me·Do~ald, are torty-slx workers,eighteen with more than tenyears of service to their creditand three who have been em-ployed by The Tribune morethan twenty years. In the roto-gravure press room, under R. J.Waggett Sr., are ninety press-men and assistants, twenty-sixof whom have worked for The

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