Gil Roschuni:  

As most who remember me know, I was the editor of the school newspaper in my senior year. After school I studied electrical engineering but changed my major to architecture and changed it again to fine arts. Considering my chosen field, art, I decided that college was not the best place for me. For a while I hung out with a band called The Second Coming which morphed into the Allman Brothers Band. I sometimes did the light show for them and helped them set up on occasion. I wrote a number of songs at that time, but they were too intellectual for a Southern Rock band to use. In November, 1969 I took off for NYC where I lived for 10 years. When I first arrived, they had a snow storm. I had never seen more than a dusting of snow in Atlanta until then. That was quite a shock to someone used to Florida winters. During my time in NY I had a job working for an animation company on Madison Ave followed by jobs working in various design studios. I naturally gravitated to typography and publication design. During that time I also joined the Unification Church and began working with them. In 1981 I was asked to design The Washington Times, a design for which I have won several international awards over the years. We began publishing the newspaper in May of 1982. During the startup of the paper I was responsible for setting up and managing the editorial art department, the computer services operation (now called IT), and the pre-press production group. I passed off the IT and production roles to others as we built up staff and became the Art Director of the newspaper. Even while in that role, I spent a lot of time managing the installation of the newsroom editorial system. I even programmed the first classified system we used, so we could begin publishing classifieds while we waited several months for the system vendor to engineer the real one. In those days editorial and classified systems were complicated affairs using custom-built terminals and hardware. Often it would take several months between an order and the installation of the system. I became very concerned about the effect of computer pagination systems on the design of the newspaper so I migrated from the art department to the IT department in the mid 80's. I joined a chorus of IT managers in the industry calling for systems built on off-the-shelf hardware and operating systems, a common practice today but a radical idea at the time. At the end of the decade we were one of the first newspapers to convert to such a system. I spent a great deal of time working with vendors and teaching them about design and typography. I eventually worked with Tim Gill at Quark to develop QuarkXPress 3 to provide the sort of tools and capabilities that were needed in newspaper production. As a result of that joint effort, XPress took off and became the standard for newsrooms around the world. In the mid '90s I designed and built the newspaper's first website. I turned over the operation of the site to the newsroom and I turned my attention to finding a content management system for the newsroom that would allow us to completely paginate the paper electronically as well as integrate well with the web, which was really beginning to take off. Many vendors of the time were just becoming aware of the worldwide web and needed some convincing that ultimately it would become the main thrust of a newsroom. In 2000 we installed the SaxoPress editorial system in the newsroom and quickly replaced the manual process of pasting up the newspaper in the composing room. We completely eliminated the composing room and began to assemble the paper totally electronically, something that was only a dream when we first started. We were able to easily move stories from the system to the web in a matter of seconds during breaking news events. We also had the capability to easily feed stories and multimedia into the system from the field, something else barely dreamed of when the paper was first started. Photographers could edit their photos and video at a shoot on their laptops and transmit into the paper's servers over cellular modems. It's so normal and effortless now, but it was a long uphill battle to get to that point. Since my original design for the newspaper's website, the site has gone through a few redesigns which were outside of my control. In late 2007 we began a complete redesign of the site and all of the infrastructure. I moved out of the IT department back into editorial, where I became in charge of online design for the WashingtonTimes.com online media. I worked on a new web design with a long-time friend, Roger Black, who designed the Rolling Stone magazine, worked at the New York Times for a while and has redesigned several large newspapers and magazines such as Newsweek. His firm now also specializes in web design. Launch of the new web design took place in June of 2008. We also launched a redesign I did of the printed paper in September of 2008. Unfortunately, the web design was too complex and took too much time to download on such a heavily trafficked site such as ours. We got over 20 million page views a month. So in 2010 we redesigned the website again, greatly simplifying it. I also redesigned the newspaper, using a new set of fonts for text and headlines for the first time since we started publishing. Most of 2012 I spent working on upgrading the newsroom's SAXoTECH system to the current version and switching from QuarkXPress to InDesign for layout. In the process we replaced all the hardware the newsroom and IT used to produce the paper each day. In the process I rebuilt all the fonts and templates we used for production so that we could work seamlessly across iMac and PC platforms, essentially to facilitate allowing the users to work on the system remotely. Many users now work mostly from home. In 2013 I left the Times after 37 years working for the company. On a personal note, I was married in 1975 to Franette Palmer, whom I met through our church. We were married in Seoul, Korea in a joint ceremony with 1800 couples from around the world. As a result, I have friends on nearly every continent. I dearly love my wife and am continuously grateful for her loving presence. She is an incredible person and spends much of her time working with local ministers to bring them together in fellowship across sectarian lines. She also spent 40 days in Palestine working with the Christians and Muslims there to build relationships. She is now working as a real estate agent and supplementing our SS income enough to get by. We have six children, Michael (1979), Celeste (1980), Alice (1982), Hana (1984), Carol (1986) and Eric (1988). Michael and Celeste were born in NYC at a birthing center. Then in 1982 we moved to the Washington, DC area where all of the rest of our children were born. All of the kids were born through midwives, either at the Maternity Center or at home. Alice caught us by surprise and was actually born in the car on the way to the Maternity Center in Bethesda, Maryland. After that we decided to have the rest of the children at home, which we did except for Eric who was born at the Center due to potential complications. We currently live in Bowie, MD, just east of DC. As of this writing my oldest son, Michael, who attended Maryland University on a full scholarship, has graduated with honors with a BA in fine arts and is married to Bianca Ferrerio, an Italian from Bergamo. They had their first child, a boy, Bryan Francesco, in January 2012. They live down th...Expand for more