Limitations of space.(electronic publishing)

My 7-year-old daughter Laura loves to create. My wife and I predict that someday she'll own an art studio or make her living as an illustrator or designer. Whereas some kids need games or gadgets to entertain themselves, Laura can occupy hours and hours with a big pile of paper, some crayons or markers, and if she's really lucky, tape and scissors. I have stacks of one-of-a-kind masterpieces created by her, and each one is a keeper for different reasons. At some point, however, I fear I'm going to run out of space to store all of these works of art.

One luxury she has is that her "canvas" is virtually limitless. She can keep creating for as long as she wants, confident and comfortable in her assumption that we will keep buying paper and materials. As editors in the trade press, we're not so lucky. The number of editorial pages we have to work with in each issue is directly related to the number of ad pages--the fewer pages of advertising we have, the more pages of editorial we must cut. The challenge of planning an issue and writing stories in advance of knowing how many pages are available often leaves us scrambling to edit stories further and reduce the page lengths at the last minute.

So, as we conduct research and interviews for any ...