November 20, 2002
The Dalton Raid has expanded to eight pages. It’s a monster. Going to be very strong. Several never before published photos.

At the staff meeting yesterday morning we discussed bleedover, which is our term for the increasing problem of ads bleeding and blending into editorial. It’s not just our problem. I’ve seen awful examples in Vanity Fair, Time and Newsweek, where the blurring of lines between editorial and advertising creates an irritating mess for the reader’s eyes. Our worst example of this is in the January issue, pages 46 and 47. A house ad, with the same background color as the page of photographs on the right hand page, really obliterates the barrier. It doesn’t help that an ad for American Photograph Archive is also on the left hand page and is too close in style to the editorial photos on right. I want there to be a nice, clean demarcation between ads and editorial, and I’m increasingly leaning towards simpler, white backgrounds on editorial pages, just to distance them from advertising. Daniel leans towards putting color backgrounds on editorial and I think we need to be very selective in doing this.

Had lunch at Pei Wei with Jana, Carole, Robert and Gus (I bought Jana and Carole’s lunch, $26 cash). Sat outside. Just beautiful out. Jana told about her secret project involving “bull”. Going to be a blockbuster.

R.G. had to fly to his mother's funeral in Ohio. We are going to send flowers.

I need to produce a doubletruck for Tom Tumus’s High Sonoran Style magazine, so I came home after lunch and patched together the javelina biker gang entries from this journal, tacked on a lead, and emailed it back to the office for Gus to lay out. Now to find some decent javelina art. I considered luring the actual gang into our front yard with treats and then taking photos from the roof, but Kathy thinks I’m nuts for making this a Cecil B. DeMille production and she’s right. I may just grab a photo of the little hippos out of a book and call it a day. It would be cool though, and then I could scan the photos and put them up here for all to see. Wouldn’t you love to see the little twits who have been terrorizing our neighborhood? Ha. Of course you would.

"The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people."
 —Lucille S. Harper