As a long-time subscriber of Parsiana I enjoy scanning through the hard copy of every new issue as soon as it arrives. However, there is one editorial practice I find very annoying.
You begin each article on the top of a new page. Consequently, at the end of many articles the reader is referred to the back of the magazine with a line reading "continued on page ...” This makes for very disjointed and annoying reading. In fact, I often give up on finding the last part of the article!
My graphic designer friends tell me that this is known as a "lazy page layout practice.” With some effort, it should be possible for your graphic designer to resize some photos or advertisements to fill space to get around this problem. That would make it easier for subscribers to read each article to its conclusion without having to flick pages and find the concluding paragraphs on another page. Alternatively, you could start a new article mid-page wherever necessary.
Dr PESHOTAN HOMI KATRAK
Sydney, Australia
P.Katrak@unsw.edu.au
The editors reply:
Many thanks for writing to state your point of view. This has been an age old complaint of subscribers and a quandary we have had to struggle with all these years. One even cancelled his subscription but later reconsidered.
We do our best to avoid continuations. One could shorten an article or drop a photo but when so much effort has gone into research and writing a piece or procuring a photograph we are loath to do so. As it is, space constraints weigh heavily with us. Starting a new column or article mid-way may not do justice to the subject. And, as we would have to subjectively choose which piece to start mid-way, readers would assume there is a bias. Also, the impact of the piece would be diluted and the page design compromised.
In publications that receive odd sized advertisments or carry fillers, this lacuna can be overcome. But one must have those.
The dummy for an issue is made before all the articles and advertisement material are in hand. The pages are allocated on estimates and past experiences.
We went through our past issues to check the number of continuations. The August 7-20 had four; August 21-September 6 had three; September 7-20 had two;September 21-October 6 had three; October 7-20 had none; October 21-November 6 and November 7-20 had one each, and November 21-December 6 issue had two.
The Readers’ Forum and Events and Personalities columns had the most continuations.
Dr Katrak responds:
The editors’ response gives readers good information about the reasons for the "continuations,” but then leaves the matter unresolved. The analysis of continuations in recent issues is also informative. At first glance, this seems to indicate that continuations occur in many if not the majority of articles in many issues!
I feel that it could be more productive for the editors to either offer any alternative practices that could be adopted, or at the very least ask the readership for their views on the matter via a brief electronic survey.