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Whittier Smallwood, center left, longtime pressroom manager for The Seattle Medium, explains printing operations to Karen Rathe’s Publication Design class (COM 491) spring quarter. At right, Amy Monroe peers into a barrel of black ink. Behind her are fellow students Holly Gordon and Andrew Hart.
Design students visit Seattle Medium Newspaper Group, tour press
By KATI LITTLE
UW News Lab
UW Publication Design students visited The Seattle Medium Newspaper Group in the Central District to tour the home base of four radio stations, four newspapers and a printing press. Chris B. Bennett, co-publisher and editor who spoke with the students, called his father’s creation a “community potpourri of media outlets.”
The newspapers include not only the flagship Seattle Medium, founded in 1970, but also the Portland Medium, the Tacoma True Citizen and the Seattle Metro Homemaker. In addition, the company owns and operates radio station KBMS-AM in Portland and three AM stations in Seattle collectively known as the Z-Twins: KRIZ, KZIZ and KYIZ.
The younger Bennett has been working at the Seattle Medium since he was 9 years old. He began in the pressroom, learning how to “type blindly” on an old linotype machine. He took a brief hiatus to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta and major in accounting and business administration. He eventually found himself drawn back to the family business. Since then he’s seen the company expand into radio during the deregulations of the ‘80s, add more press machines in times of success, and oversee several facelifts of the newspaper’s design.
Bennett’s father was not fettered to a design style during the years he was running the company. The design of the newspaper would sometimes change from week to week, Bennett said, and it still would if his father had his way. But the younger Bennett says the reader wants to see consistency in a newspaper’s design because it affects the feeling of the content.
Today, Bennett’s father, Chris H. Bennett, is semi-retired and mainly involved with the radio side of the company.
Bennett shared his philosophies on publication design with the students. A newspaper’s design can play a major role in adjusting to younger readers or accommodating older ones, he said. Bennett has increased the font size of the body text to 12 point on pages that are mostly read by older readers. In doing so, however, he admits that articles take up more space, leaving less room for pictures and text elements that attract younger readers.
Bennett says he is trying to achieve a modern but classic look with The Seattle Medium. For the community of the newspaper, however, the relationship goes beyond a mood personified by words and images on a printed page.
Bennett says about 35 percent of his job is helping people in the community. He says readers contact him, often before the police, when trouble comes knocking at the door. The Seattle Medium is also politically involved, working with the Rev. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and others who promote the interests of African Americans on a national scale.
The class concluded the tour in the newspaper’s pressroom, which was dominated by a Goss Community web press. Longtime press manager Whittier Smallwood explained how the press operates as students tried to avoid brushing up against an open barrel of black ink nearby.
Instructor Karen Rathe noted that few weekly papers have their press operation in the same building as their editorial offices. "It's kind of a remarkable thing these days," she said.
KATI LITTLE is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.
