My dear reader,
I know I said we’d do a nightclub section next week in my last letter. And I know how much you were all looking forward to it. I know. I know it hurts to be lied to, but I just can’t do this anymore. In retrospect, the idea of doing special sections at the very beginning of the school year was a silly idea.
This week’s paper ties together much more nicely than the last one did. There are food pieces all through the paper-even the Hoopleville is about food this week-and the restaurant list came out nicely, even though I think our production manager, Melissa St. Germain wanted to kill me when I moved all her stuff around to get it to fit. But it’s been a lot of work on some stuff that requires a lot of fancy dancing, and we are a young baby of a staff that’s still trying to learn how to walk properly.
We have learned a lot from these two issues. We’ve found out how important collaboration is and how impossible things get if communication breaks down. I think we may have figured out why our pictures keep on coming out dark and muddy-that’s is also a communication issue, in this case between The Free Press and the company that prints our final product. We’re also learning more about our new layout software (Adobe InDesign) all the time: our latest hurdle is properly merging the Arts and Entertainment and Sports sections, which are designed and laid out by their respective editors, into the rest of the paper.
The font we’re using for most of our text can’t be italicized; any italics that you see in the paper have been manually tilted by Melissa with her razor sharp InDesign skills.
That’s the kind of thing I mean when I say this has been a learning experience. We are learning new skills by experience, not just getting an ineffectual, we-overcame-great-odds, Cool Runnings kind of “learning experience.”
While we’re talking about layout, I want to address the page in our last issue that dealt with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and dating. It was pretty much a disaster, as far as layout goes. There are all kinds of implicit messages being sent by the placement of the material on the page: first of all, it looks like Iris is some kind of STD/sex expert, or worse, someone who is an STD expert due to having too much sex. This is not the case, I assure you, gentle reader! Iris’s headshot was supposed to go next to the dating piece, because it’s an editorial, and editorials traditionally are accompanied with head shots. Also, the cartoon at the top of the page is meant to go with the STD article-it doesn’t make any sense where it is.
None of these problems are Melissa’s fault. She has gone from knowing nothing about layout to producing some of the best work The Free Press has seen in years-which is saying a lot, because last year’s production manager was a prodigy.
I hope you can forgive me for lying to you. And keep those letters coming in. I’m not fibbing you about the fact that I’m fetishistically studying all of them. It’s kind of weird, how fervently I care about each and every one of you.