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Mar. 28th, 2007 10:45 pmIt is exactly three weeks since I resumed publication work, something I haven't done for more than six years (since I quit the last full-time newspaper job I had). For those of you keeping score, I spent seven years doing just that, before I quit following a months-long snit with my publisher and was sort of forced into freelancing (as well as taking every part-time and contract job to come my way - including catering - to pay the rent) because the economy was Teh Suck for my line of work.
Anyway. The first week's lesson was starting to learn about commodities futures and how to write about them. The second week's was dealing with computer glitches and re-learning what I knew about page-building programs. This week's lesson (carried over from last week) was re-learning physical page layout. For those of you who aren't savvy to this, basically it means taking all the ads the salespeople have sold and figuring out how many pages to make the paper AND laying them out in such a way as to be pleasing to the eye, not conflict with another ad on the page in subject matter (or competition), and conform to basic news design theory. Oh, and leave enough space for news copy and photos.
You don't get puzzle pieces and a picture. It's basically mental Tetris - you only know how large the ads are and the subject matter. Ads are made in blocks, expressed in "number of columns x height in inches." Our paper is about 90 pages a week; I'm up to doing close to 30 of those myself (I used to do it all the time; I'm just rusty). You get little pieces of paper as mockup pages, and you start with the biggest ads to build each page from the bottom up, inside out (from the fold to the edge). The trick is to know about how much copy you have, in your head, to do this - fortunately, since I edit a good chunk of it and the columnists, I can visualize fairly well.
And they say writers don't need to be good at math, and that algebra and geometry never helps you in real life. *smirk* (The algebra actually was of great help when I was doing the corporate taxes for the last guy who employed me.)
I expect nobody but![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yoiebear will give two flips in a fig about any of this. But it's occasionally necessary that I spend time on things other than fandom. ;-)
Anyway. The first week's lesson was starting to learn about commodities futures and how to write about them. The second week's was dealing with computer glitches and re-learning what I knew about page-building programs. This week's lesson (carried over from last week) was re-learning physical page layout. For those of you who aren't savvy to this, basically it means taking all the ads the salespeople have sold and figuring out how many pages to make the paper AND laying them out in such a way as to be pleasing to the eye, not conflict with another ad on the page in subject matter (or competition), and conform to basic news design theory. Oh, and leave enough space for news copy and photos.
You don't get puzzle pieces and a picture. It's basically mental Tetris - you only know how large the ads are and the subject matter. Ads are made in blocks, expressed in "number of columns x height in inches." Our paper is about 90 pages a week; I'm up to doing close to 30 of those myself (I used to do it all the time; I'm just rusty). You get little pieces of paper as mockup pages, and you start with the biggest ads to build each page from the bottom up, inside out (from the fold to the edge). The trick is to know about how much copy you have, in your head, to do this - fortunately, since I edit a good chunk of it and the columnists, I can visualize fairly well.
And they say writers don't need to be good at math, and that algebra and geometry never helps you in real life. *smirk* (The algebra actually was of great help when I was doing the corporate taxes for the last guy who employed me.)
I expect nobody but
yoiebear will give two flips in a fig about any of this. But it's occasionally necessary that I spend time on things other than fandom. ;-)
