For those who do not know, I am close to finishing my term as the managing editor for The Breeze, the campus newspaper at James Madison University. In addition to being an editor, I also act as a photographer and freelancer since that is my main passion. I’ve held my position since last April and will be leaving when I am replaced in April of this year. I work crazy hours and love it. To give a better understanding about how a newspaper works, I thought it might be a good idea to explain the process from my perspective, using the past few days as examples. Here we go…
During Spring Break (which ran from March 1 to March 9), I dropped in over a couple days to make adjustments to a supplement that came out during today’s issue of the paper. What kind of adjustments? Little things… ads not being lined up right, brainstorming about what fonts and potential layouts could be done for once the stories came in, and filling in odd-spaced holes with house ads (advertisements that are produced in-house). Then I tried to enjoy my Spring Break like any normal person.
On Monday The Breeze had a staff meeting to discuss upcoming stories and photo ideas. We have staff meetings twice weekly which are on the same days that issues come out, Monday and Thursday.
After Monday’s staff meeting I received a page budget from the advertising department, which lists all ads that plan to run and says how large the paper would be. In this case, it said today’s paper would be 16 pages. I helped my upcoming replacement, Anna, figure out the allotment of space, set up blank pages with the correct dates for the upcoming issue and create a production order to send to the printer (so they know how large our paper will be and where we will have color). After Anna took off I posted the page budget to an in-house wiki, so the editors here knew how much space they would have to work with. This whole process took a little over three hours.
On Tuesday the advertising dept. determined that more ads had come in, so we had to change to a 20 page paper. So basically… everything done Monday had to be redone.
Then came a bit of spot news, so I shot a rollover on the highway. Luckily it was nothing major.
I also met a police representative that afternoon for a brief interview on a previous accident.
In addition to that, Tuesday served as a production day for the supplement. Everything in a 16 page tabloid for the Centennial (this week is the 100-year anniversary for our school) had to be finalized. I finished class at 7:30 at night, popping in and out of the office earlier in the day to edit. After all the material was in, the copy editors, Shelly and Kelly, compiled the material on the pages while our art director, Lauren, and assistant sports editor, Matt, all worked on different parts. Long story short, after revisions and corrections were complete, I walked out of the office at 3 a.m. after sending all the supplement pages to the printer by e-mail.
Wednesday rolls around and I get an email at 8:20 a.m. The printer had not been able to access the e-mail account that we send our pages to. So I had to resend them. I get into the office at 10:30 a.m. and spend most of the day editing stories, working up my own photos that I’d shot during some free time, working with editors to correct page layouts, adding corrections to the Web site, writing a story of my own and sending all completed pages to the printer. I have no class on Wednesdays so I have the entire day free. After the pages were all sent into the printer by our 9 p.m. deadline (And then some resent due to a few problems), I gave the webmaster a hand with setting up a poll question and updating the Web site ads. Time out of the office… 10 p.m.
There you have it, my job in a nutshell. Tonight we have another staff meeting and the whole thing will start over again. Mix in a media law test test tomorrow, and you have the hectic life of a college journalist. But by tomorrow afternoon… I’ll be in Roanoke. Virginia News Photographer’s Association conference!
