There's No 'Weekend' This Weekend!

The Washington Post's Weekend section has taken the week off. Why, in my day...

My very first job at The Washington Post was in the Weekend section, the Friday arts and entertainment tabloid. During my spell there — from 1989 to 1998; first as deputy editor, then as editor — there were times when we worried the section might actually be too big, have too many pages, have too many ads.

So imagine my surprise this morning when I saw a note at the bottom of The Post’s front page: “Weekend: The section is off this week. Movie reviews and listings are in today’s Style section.”

Off this week?!?!?!? The section that was once a groaning cash cow is off?¹ Why, in my day…

I’m gonna stop myself right there. I hate “in my day” stories. That’s because in my day I got real sick of people sharing stories about their days. And saying “in my day” suggests that your days are over. I want a reason to get up in the morning.

Having said all that, my days of editing the Weekend section are most definitely in the past. The realities — financial, journalistic, cultural — of 1994 are vastly different from those in 2024.² The internet came and drank everybody’s milkshake.

But let us travel back to the early 1990s, to a random Wednesday morning. Wednesday is the day we “close” the Weekend section. After dropping my briefcase off in my office at 15^th and L streets NW, I head to the fourth floor and the Makeup Department. There, I get a light coat of Max Factor pancake, some rouge, eyeshadow and lipstick.

Kidding! The Makeup Department was the section that took all of the ads for that Friday’s Weekend and combined them with my request for editorial space. I’d want a succession of open pages for the cover story and department fronts and advertisers would want to be near the appropriate content: nightclub ads with the nightclub listings, movie ads near the movie reviews, etc.

This was a delicate game. It’s easy to place an advertiser who has paid extra for a full-page ad on the back cover. It goes on the back cover. It’s harder to accommodate an advertiser who has merely requested “far forward, right-hand-facing page.” That’s where all the advertisers want to be. (If you could invent a publication composed of only far forward, right-hand-facing pages, you’d be rich.) ³

It was tricky for technical reasons, too. Newsprint is threaded through the presses in a particular way. Only so many pages can have color on them. And when Weekend grew to over 120 pages, it became a challenge to accommodate it on The Post’s Springfield, Va., presses, which were also printing the advertising supplements that were inserted, along with Weekend, in Friday’s paper.

A lovely man named Curtis Kennedy⁴ was the person in Makeup normally responsible for squaring this circle. Curtis would jigger and rejigger the section, before finally printing out a sheaf of 8½-by-14-inch pages that represented that week’s Weekend. These pages were called the dummies, with all the ads marked, along with the empty editorial space on which our art director, Jo Ellen Murphy, laid out the stories, artwork and photos.

We’d spend Wednesday putting the section together, awaiting last-minute stories,⁵ trimming stories that needed trimming, penciling in where the hundreds of inches of agate listings would go.

The completed dummies then went down to the fourth-floor Composing Room to guide the printers who affixed the ads and the blocks of type and half-tone photos — all printed out on slick photo paper — onto white cardboard grids.

To stick all of this onto the grids, the printers used wax. I’ll remember a lot of things about the Composing Room — the undercurrent of tension;⁶ the Deaf printers communicating with sign language⁷; the challenge of following an agate list that jumped over multiple pages — but what sticks with me most is the smell of warm wax, as if I was working not at a modern newspaper but in a medieval chandlery.

On Thursday mornings I’d get to my office early to await copies of Weekend that would be couriered over from Springfield. I’d flip through the pages looking for big errors that could be fixed while the section was still on the press. Often, the production manager in Springfield — a man named Harry Giffen — had already found mistakes. Once, the flashing light on my office phone announced this message from Harry: “You misspelled ‘Rehoboth’ on the cover.”

A lot has changed since then and I possess no expertise that would have staved off today’s announcement that Weekend had taken the week off. ⁸ Today’s editors have it a lot harder than I did. But I can give a little hint at the shifting world of advertising and information.

Probably the Weekend section’s main draw was the movie listings. You couldn’t look up movie times online back then. There was no online! The movie studios paid for display ads and the exhibitors paid for the agate listings that told you where and when you could see “The Hudsucker Proxy.”

At one point — my blood still chills at the memory — some movie theater chain balked at this. Those movie listings were expensive. What’s more, this advertiser hinted darkly, readers wanted that information, expected it. Didn’t it make more sense, he argued, for The Washington Post to pay the movie theaters for the movie times, rather than the other way around?

It got sorted out in the end. But it was a real through-the-looking-glass moment and an early harbinger of how the whole newspaper advertising world would be upended.

I left Weekend in 1998 to do a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where I took a class on Roman gladiators. The gladiatorial games lasted about 500 years, or roughly 100 years more than newspapers have been in existence. 

1. Would a cash cow groan or would it moo?

2. Shit. I just did a quick calculation and apparently 1994 was 30 years ago!

3. I once heard Don Graham, the former Post publisher/chairman, joke about advertisers who were upset about their ads being in “the bomber pages.” The bomber pages were in the Metro section: B17, B24, etc. In other words, not far forward.

4. Curtis, who died in 2021, would jokingly demand every Wednesday morning that his name be listed on the Weekend section masthead along with the editors and advertising salespeople. At least, I think he was joking.

5. We had some great writers. Some of them depended on a deadline for motivation.

6. There were union complications. If an editor touched a piece of type — to suggest it be straightened or repositioned — the entire page was trashed.

7. Many schools for the Deaf — including Gallaudet — ran special programs to train their students for jobs in the print business. Here’s a column of mine from 2022: “An online exhibit from Gallaudet recounts the stories of deaf printers.”

8. Maybe Will Lewis’s Third Newsroom can help. For my take on Sir Will see my inaugural Substack post: “Fleet Street, Main Street and the Continuing Implosion of Will Lewis.”