We got back to work this week – no small feat considering the long-awaited Christmas and New Year’s holidays were now past.
That’s all right, we’ll leave the trees up to remember the holly-filled days gone by.
Of course we have some swell storms and a cold front to entertain us and remind us winter is here.
I especially enjoy kicking things off on Mondays, my least favorite day of the week anytime of the year.
I know, everyone else probably feels the same way.
But Mondays for me are layout day for the Sentinel.
That means I have a stack of stories – although not many of them following the no-school, little work gets done during Yuletide weeks.
And we have photos to choose from.
By now, I and countless other newspaper editors across America will have used thousands of photos of Santa, kids and decorations (those will stay up a while too).
So, yeah, it’s back to work designing pages that are intended to draw the readers’ interest.
There are many rules that have
been hard-wired inside me about newspaper design that most people hardly notice.
An example is bumping heads – two headlines side by side.
In olden times, that was a graven rule because they would confuse the reader. Now it’s part of an effort of blending photos with stories.
All pages are digitally laid out by keystrokes to achieve the final product that you have when you hold the paper.
That said, this part of the job has been a challenge to me from day one.
But my biggest fear on Mondays – and any other day for that matter – is making a mistake in the layout, then having the computer crash when you try to go back and correct things.
That memory is fresh on my mind since it just happened about two hours ago. Now the idea is save every few minutes as you go – especially on days like Monday with the bad weather and very unreliable online service
I’d put about an hour on a page, editing and getting things to fall into place when I tried to correct something.
At that point, a wretched blue circle starts spinning that tells me if I didn’t save – not at all it seems – that my luck had just run out and I had to start over.
That circle is an instrument of torture – and a sign of poor discipline in saving. I’ve saved about 20 times in writing this.
I’ll forget this lesson but perhaps it will take a month of two before the circle returns.
