Blog
The quiet region problem
Organising a publication by geography rather than topic exposes something a topic-based layout hides: some parts of the world are much harder to read about than others.
The Friday edition used to be organised by topic — regulation, materials, sustainability, business. It read well and it was quietly misleading, because a topic-based layout lets you fill a page from wherever the copy happens to be plentiful without ever showing the reader where that was.
Switching to regional sections changed that. The page now has five headings and each one has to be filled from that region’s own feeds or left out. The result is a publication that visibly runs at different depths in different places, which is uncomfortable and correct.
What the split actually looks like
UK and Europe will fill its section every week; the feed pool there is deep enough that the difficulty is choosing, not finding. The Americas are much the same. Asia produces two or three items most weeks, nearly all from India and Singapore. Africa produces one or two, and they are almost always South African. Australia and New Zealand sit somewhere in between, largely because one publisher covers both countries properly.
None of that reflects how much packaging activity happens in those places. It reflects how much of it is written up in English, by a trade title, in a feed.
Why the caps matter more than the floors
Each region is capped at four items. Without that cap the European feeds would take ten places and the geographic split would become decorative — five headings over a page that is still mostly one region.
The cap is doing something slightly unusual: it is deliberately excluding material that is available and good, in order to keep space for material that is scarcer. That is a real editorial cost, paid every week, and it is the right trade because the alternative is a page that claims to be international and is not.
A routine plant investment in Johannesburg may be the most significant packaging story Africa produced that week, and belongs in the edition even though the same story from Germany would not make the cut.
The honest failure mode
Some weeks a region will be empty and its heading will simply not appear. There is no placeholder and no apology line, because both would be a way of drawing attention to the gap while doing nothing about it.
The gap is worth doing something about, though. If you know of an English-language packaging trade title in West Africa, East Africa, mainland China, Japan or Korea that publishes a feed, that is the single most useful thing anyone could send this publication.