'A picture is worth 488 words' or 'Newspaper production at a small weekly'

On my tax return, I noted next to my virtually useless Social Security Number that my occupation is “journalist.” I might as well not have entered anything, though, for all that word really specifies how I spend my 40 hours a week.

From the scoop-hunting newsrooms of The Washington Post to the sole news desk in the corner at the Sioux County Capital-Democrat, journalism entails completely different things.

One visits washingtonpost.com once or twice a day in order to learn what is happening in the world – murders, bombings, government scandals, new laws, you name it. But in your average small-town newspaper, the news isn’t what sells subscriptions. (Subscriptions are essential – a higher number of subscribers both attracts more advertisers and makes a publication eligible for certain types of legal advertising, which brings in a good chunk of change.) A household subscribes, reads regularly, because the businesses they shop at advertise, or because they want to know who among their neighbors was arrested or married or gave birth or died, how the high school football team did, what free events are coming up. A big-city newsroom would be concerned with none of these things, but they’re the first things you might look for in your weekly. The name is rather misleading – news is the most expendable portion of a weekly paper. Yes, the occasional controversy at the school board will sell some extra issues that week, but counter sales are a minimal income for this type of publication. If the news stories there are are truly heinous, the paper will be less successful, but moving from decent stories to fantastic stories won’t make much difference to the bottom line.

The first thing that must be done each week in the news department at a weekly (often one person) is an assessment of how much space (or how many column-inches, in newsspeak) must be filled. What makes this step most challenging, perhaps, is that it isn’t possible.

The majority of newspapers are funded by advertising, and just how much room the advertising will take up in a given week is not finalized until just hours before the deadline. If an unusually large amount has been sold, the newspaper may choose to add extra pages to the issue. Here, however, there lies a fine line. If only a large amount of ads has been sold (but not unusually large), then the publication may remain at a normal number of pages and the news “department” will be cramped for space. But if the staff extends the issue, they will find themselves “loose” on space and scrambling to find enough copy. How many pages to run is not a decision lightly made, especially among tabloid-size publications that can only adjust their length by increments of four pages.

Formerly, my title was “reporter/photographer.” Again, this was somewhat deceiving as to my actual duties. At least 20 percent of every week is spent in what is called “layout,” or production, of the newspaper. We create what the readers see completely by computer, and it takes significant time to do it. It might take me an hour and a half to actually write the front page text, but it will often take at least that much time just to arrange that page in its final setup.

Challenges:
*A photograph or image of some type really needs to begin “above the fold,” or on the top half of the page.
*The most important or most interesting story needs to be at the top. Sometimes more than one story deserves to be up there, or you’d rather that readers saw more than one headline above that fold. Unfortunately, it is very dangerous to place two headlines directly next to each other, or you might end up with “Peas are good, Bush says”/”Clowns make good friends,” or something hilarious you’d find on Jay Leno. How do you separate them and keep the page looking good?
*Stories should form one rectangle whenever possible.
*Every line, corner, cranny must be filled. Sometimes you must add to or cut from a story to make it fit in the space you have.
*Your photographs might only “work” on one side of the page. If the person is facing left, the photo will most likely need to be placed on the left side of the page. Maybe you have two photos and they both need to be placed on the left. Then your page is off-balance. Or maybe it isn’t off balance, but they leave an awkward amount of space left between them that is too narrow to fit a headline and the start of a story.
*Your headlines must be catchy, must be complete phrases when possible, and they must come as close to the far edge of the column whenever humanly possible. You just try writing a two column-wide headline that inevitably must include “sex offender” and “ordinance.” The phrase you use must place the two terms on separate lines – the terms will not fit on the same line (in the appropriate font size) and neither can be hyphenated and continued on the next line.
*Headline fonts must decrease as you go down the page.

A picture, so they say, is worth 1,000 words. That’s a rather liberal estimate, I say. Your standard tall two-column photo will compensate for maybe 400 words worth of space (similar to a 4x6 snapshot). When you add in a caption (make it a long one), you might be talking 450 words. Add a title, and you could make 500. Still, even 400 words is a considerable hole when it comes to the crunch before the deadline. When our office assistant tells me that I’ve cleaned out her stash of filler photos, this is a warning to be heeded. Readers love photos, and I love giving them photos (a quick fix to most problems), but sometimes there just aren’t any photos to be had.