Basics: As the first woman or minority in that job, Eisert transformed every aspect of visual coverage.

Details: She created the first national assignments and projects for staff photographers, creating a national stringer network, completely revamping a broken, wasteful and demoralizing assignment system, creating the paper’s first picture pages, it’s first 5 and 6-column pictures, and creating the first planning done for A1 and other section fronts. 

Managing Editor Howard Simons remarked of Eisert’s work that she’d “done more in your first six months than all the picture editors The Post has had in all the time they’d had them.”

Basics: In this extended consultancy, Eisert spearheaded creation of the DoD’s Public Web Program, building a team from 13 department heads who were initially adamant that any combined approach wasn’t in their individual interests.

Details: Eisert quickly learned that several previous attempts at this task by other consultants had been shut down by these department heads. But she brought a completely different perspective to the strategic planning and reorganized the work of these departments, helping get multiple departments to rethink and reorganize their structure and approach – and make a team. 

She received DoD approval and funded the transformational effort which also enhanced site stability and functionality, radically revised their technology, expanded video capability, saved costs, provided more flexibility and use of resources, and, most importantly, demonstrated shared benefits for the departments themselves as well as the public, contractors, and government in general.

Basics:  Eisert was responsible for everything visual on the magazine and Eisert maximized the work of top freelance photographers, illustrators and writers from around the country as well as leveraging a stellar staff.

Details: This combination of rich visual options, along with great writing, helped create devoted readers and numerous awards for this weekly, which Eisert radically redesigned in a half day since there was no more time available than that. 

Basics: Founded and designed a graphic approach to healthcare

Details: She says that maybe it was because she’d lived in two tech hubs – San Jose, and Seattle – “I had an idea for a graphic, software approach to healthcare that could aid both patients and doctors, especially in dealing with complex medical situations.” So she took a sort of graphic side trip to try to change the way we approach healthcare and put power in patient’s hands and improve dialogue with doctors. 

To launch this startup, Eisert graduated from the Founder Institute, the world’s premier idea-stage startup accelerator training. While doctors and patients loved this approach, venture capitalists yawned. They were not amused to see a woman show up, especially one over age 25.

Basics: Eisert was the first and only journalist on the founding team of four senior editors. She was refiner of the mission, pusher of all boundaries and recruiter of journalists to the staff in a project that forever graphically changed the face of the internet and news. The result significantly exceeded Microsoft’s expectations.

Details: At a time of slow dialup and tiny pictures, Sandra’s clever thinking made dominant picture use possible, and made the use of CMS practical and robust. This Rubik’s Cube of design, which offered editors instant, infinite options, didn’t just change the face of the internet, it also transformed picture use from postage stamp-level to being the dominant, instantly appearing elements on the web screen.

The site’s revolutionary design, pieces of which can still be seen on most internet sites today, allowed the first content management system to deliver the best design and news photography on the internet in just a click and delivered them in any kind of presentation package necessary on any browser, including Microsoft’s proprietary software.

The site also introduced the first videos and interactive graphics, two arenas of visual coverage Eisert also long promoted. 

The journalistic quality of this staff and its product and was good as any major publication Eisert had worked on. Her design saved Microsoft about $5 million in production costs annually and allowed complex, precise project creation almost instantaneously, rather than in a 25-hour cycle as earlier efforts allowed. The product this team built far exceeded Microsoft’s original plan of six templets, five of which contained tiny pre-sized pictures. Instead, in a time of dialup speeds, pictures instantly downloaded and dominated Sandra’s designs, drawing attention to highest quality stories. Even if it was done with smoke and mirrors, the impossible was an everyday thing at MSNBC.com. Users loved it!!!

Eisert had seen the issues facing print journalism when even publishers would not face those issues; “I knew things had to change.” she said. “I recall a few people asking me what I was doing wasting a perfectly good career on “something like this!”  All I could say was that, “I just don’t think you understand yet.” 

In the moments just before the team pushed the button to launch, visionary fellow Senior Editor John Callan asked us all, she said, “if we didn’t wonder if this was how Gutenberg had felt one day hundreds of years earlier. That was how big that moment seemed.”

A rare screen grab from the MSNBC.com newsroom as Sandra, center, as the Senior Editor and Director of Graphics works with Business Editor Mark Pawlosy, seated at the VDT screen, while coordinating with (l-r) David Kaill, Brenden West and Breanna Anderson of the Development team. Microsoft had been organized in small, single-person offices and a newsroom had to be built out of existing space so journalists could collaboratively communicate with one another the way they did in the many newsrooms from which they came.

Basics: Primarily running the network for the Southern U.S, Eisert was the first woman on staff to edit in that office which, in addition to directing all coverage for the South, also handled many major news events including visits of all foreign leaders, White House coverage and rapid Capitol Hill national and regional coverage – always trying to stay ahead of UPI. 

Details: Eisert went to AP to learn how to rapidly deliver on major and fast-moving stories. This knowledge came in very handy in some of the major news stories she covered in her next roles, including managing strategies for mega and fast-moving stories. She was the first woman or minority to work as a picture editor in this key bureau.

Basics: Eisert was the paper’s first Design Director and the first woman or minority to be a Senior Graphics Editor at the Merc where she coordinated an avalanche of major sections and photographic projects as well as introducing design to the front page and most other sections of the paper. 

Details: In the Graphics Editor role, while always keeping the photographers and the photography staff at the forefront of her efforts, she was responsible for the visual content of all section fronts and all special sections and picture pages.

As a Graphics Editor she, of course, coordinated with all editors, writers and departments and managed photographers and resources on a daily basis and worked closely with the art department on informational graphics and illustration and coordinated backshop production. 

That job eventually included creating the Mercury News Design Desk, which, although not the first Design Desk in the country, had major impact throughout the publication. This Knight-Ridder newspaper of Silicon Valley was a national graphics leader with a great photographic and picture editing staff; in National Press Photographers Association competition, the Mercury-News team won the Angus McDougall Award for Overall Excellence in Picture Editing and six additional Overall Best Use of Pictures team awards within eight years. 

The team also sponsored an annual Graphics Conference which brought together some of the best visual talent in the country and played an important role in setting national standards high and sharing successes. Building on the foundational work of NPPA Sprague winner J. Bruce Baumann, in roughly a decade, her work along with that of a lot of intensely dedicated writers, editors, photographers and artists helped transform what had been a modest community newspaper into a Top Ten publication. 

Photography was also a critical component of the Mercury-News 1989 spot news Pulitzer Prize for earthquake coverage; in that coverage, the special section Eisert directed, designed and edited helped put “The Merc” over the top in heavy competition. That deadline-produced section also won five other international design and editing awards and created a new way to mount a section on the press to provide the kind of picture display needed to show the scope of the disaster.  

Eisert’s efforts to make the newspaper more functional for busy readers and a changing demographic led to her personal revelations about newspaper organization and design which, although not implemented then, would later become the basis for her revolutionary designs at Microsoft/MSNBC.com. 

By the end of this tour, Eisert also showed interest in working on digital formats at this Silicon Valley-based newspaper, which was the first newspaper in the country to see any internet potential. In their only meeting, the paper’s internet guru briskly explained that no one was interested in looking at pictures on the internet and that we’d wait for movie downloads  – so basically, “go away.” Eisert looked at him and thought about his lack of understanding of people’s interest in pictures and wondered if it was worth the argument. She decided not and replied with, “Oh, I didn’t know that,” turned on her heal and walked out; he never saw the light and she would pursue her interest in CDs and digital possibilities in her next position.

Basics: Eisert became the first woman or minority to become picture editor of a major U.S. newspaper, one that also consistently ranked among the top three newspapers in the country.  Quickly, and without permission, Eisert transformed the task of creating a daily picture page into a role that, except for budgeting, would later become a model for the role of Assistant Managing Editor for Graphics – handing anything and everything visual from the usual assigning, editing, cropping and placement, and then expanding to include broad use of the art department (including generating some of the first newspaper informational graphics) and creating page designs, directing special sections and leveraging page display.

Details: Eisert was privileged to work with what many then would consider to be the best photographic staff in the country, including adding two amazing women to this top-ranked photography staff, a staff which then had it’s own aerial photographer, its own mobile lab, two studios, two darkrooms and automatic processing equipment.

When Eisert started in Louisville, there was only one woman in her newsroom, one who diligently worked at the copy desk, who never looked up from her work or took a break in all the time Eisert was there. Copy desk colleagues confirmed that they never saw her chat with anyone, take a lunch break, do anything but move her copy pencil. So Eisert realized that she was alone and that how she comported herself would either open doors for others behind her or slam them tighter.

On her first day on the job, Eisert walked up to the news editor Jack Carey who looked up disdainfully over his half-frame glasses to firmly point out that he had “been in THIS job longer” than she’d been alive. She admits that she did look like she’d just escaped from junior high, so she realized the challenge she had to meet. By the end of her tour there, Carey was her biggest fan.

Sandra in the newsroom at the Louisville Picture Desk not all that long before leaving for The White House. By this time one additional woman had appeared in the newsroom and Sandra had already completed two of her earliest books and transformed the visual approach of the paper.

Basics: Eisert was the first woman or minority to have that job, with the previous such intern being 13 years prior. (Fortunately the internship was continued after her tour there.)

Details: She worked on the major news story of the year, transformed a previously thought unpublishable story into making it a strong, published story as well as helping deal with outside story submissions.

• Material World
• Women in the Material World

• Revolution Revisited

• Thinking Differently – How to Thrive Using Your Nonlinear Creative Thinking

• Williams-Sonoma’s Savoring France
• Williams-Sonoma’s Savoring Italy
• Williams-Sonoma’s Savoring Southeast Asia
• Williams-Sonoma’s Savoring Spain & Portugal

• Extraordinary Circumstances
• Photo du Jour
• Changing the Face of Power – Women in the U.S. Senate

• Fifteen Seconds – The Great California Earthquake of 1989

• Over Florida
• Over Minnesota

• A Time to Heal

• The Times of My Life

• Portrait of a President

• Small Town America

• Shooter

• The Mission: Inside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

• Open Minds

• An American Reunion – Official William Clinton Inaugural Book

• Celebrating America’s Spirit Together – Official George W. Bush Inaugural Book

• Guyana Massacre

• The Way to Tea

• Like Normal People

• Tornado!

• Barney Cowherd – Photographer

• The Living White House