Birth of a Newspaper
The CommuterTuesday, April 28, 2009
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It’s really easy to take a newspaper for granted. We find them lying on the floor of public restrooms. We see them discarded in the trash. We use them to housebreak our pets. But, what a lot of people may not know is that the flimsy concoctions of paper and ink that we leave behind on the seat of the bus or at our tables at Hotshots is really the product of the vigorous sweat and stress of a week’s worth of work.
The day one issue of the paper goes out, the next weeks has already
begun. Meetings have been held, stories have been selected, and ads have been sold. Our editor-in-chief — who gets the final say in all matters — decides how big the paper will be and then builds a story budget and distributes the stories out to our reporters. Once they have their assignments, our reporters go out and gather information and either take accompanying photos themselves or coordinate with one of our staff photographers. As the stories come in, the editor-in-chief decides if they are suitable for print and then labels them as incoming.
On Mondays and Tuesdays, the final two days before publication, our office becomes frantic. Last minute stories and advertisements are
still coming in and the associate editors begin to plow through the approved stories and decide which ones they would like to use for their sections. When their choices are made, each associate editor drops them onto their pages to decide how much space they will take and then begins to design a paper copy of their pages. When these are finished, they are handed over to our page designer who begins to build the pages.
When each page is finished, they are printed out and then given to a swarm of copy editors who begin checking the stories for spelling, grammar, and style errors. Each story passes through a number of different hands and once all the corrections have been made they are once again approved by our editor-in-chief and then handed back to our page designer who makes the final tweaks before the finished paper is sent out to print at the Albany – Democrat Herald via PDF.
At the Albany – Democrat herald, there are some final adjustments made and then metal plates of the pages are created which are then used to print off the paper. The finished papers are than bundled and picked up and distributed to various places around campus.
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