Signing off

I’ve been getting all kinds of feedback this year about how great our paper is. Administrators and faculty alike have been telling us and our advisor how great we’re doing, and on one side it makes me proud and warm inside.

On the other side though I don’t think we’ve been doing so great this semester. We’ve bungled several things, and others we haven’t covered. Since I am one of those people who plans this paper I obviously have a much more connected view of this so I can see it from every level of production. After the paper comes out I don’t need to read it because I’ve touched every article in some sense. I guess it’s just harder for me than most to look at the work I’ve created because I see all of the tiniest flaws in it.

So here’s a list of things our paper needs to do better in the future:

Consolidate control: My idea of spreading out control amongst the page editors failed in a big way. This is because on several pieces in the paper we had too many people thinking they had authority in an area where they might not. At its best this spreading of control resulted in our Gears of War 2 review, which I think was the best example of project planning ever in our paper. At its worst a spread of control created the front page of our Obama issue, which I didn’t think was a very well planned or efficient use of color or space.

Move online: I actually have no critique of this, we just need to do more of it. Andrew and Jesse, our online editors, have done a truly fantastic job that isn’t really recognized by the rest of the staff on the level it should be. Our website is now chock full of stuff. For a concrete example of this, at the beginning of the year we had about three headings on the left side of our page. Now we’ve pretty much doubled that, on only that side. The rest of our online paper still looks pretty much the same, but that is actually due to College Publisher more than us.

Deadlines: I don’t like deadlines, that’s why I don’t enforce them. I’m very quick with writing, so naturally I assume others are, but writing doesn’t work that way. They need to be enforced because with them the whole paper just moves faster and we don’t have to stay as late. I just haven’t found the will or the way to properly enforce them else I would have…. Seriously.

Story ideas: Ever since I stopped forcing a connection with the ASSC our ability to gather news I feel has been severely hampered. The pulses of this campus on an official level come from the Presidents office and the ASSC. That should be the bare minimum that we should have to cover for news to be relevant. Furthermore also due to my spreading out of power the section editors are way too used to having others make up story ideas for them. This has to stop.

Aside from those things actually there’s not much else that I can think that our paper should need to improve. I mean it’s taken me a while but I’ve realized in our paper the only thing that should need to matter is covering our campus. I don’t really care about winning at JACC anymore because I don’t think we’ll be raking in the awards there until JACC allows for more categories in online content, which should be about the same time hell freezes over.

These things aren’t things I’ll have to deal with though. I’ll be leaving these to my successor as I move onto San Francisco State. That person will need to be pretty good, and to flex my ego for a second, it may actually be hard to find someone who was as dedicated as I was. So I guess this is Nick Donofrio Editor In Chief of the Skyline View signing off.

Joining the Skyline View

A couple of weeks ago I posted up an entry on possible ways to get a story in the Skyline View, but i left out a very important method.  Joining our staff is actually the best way to get a story in the Skyline View.

We actually have an example of this on our staff right now.  Our opinions editor Luis Osorio is a leading member in the Hermanos club.

This is because as a club member you can easily inform other members of our paper of new events that your club is sponsoring.  There is a problem with this; a club member can not write anything about your own club.  For example, Luis couldn’t actually write anything on the Hermanos club because if he did that would show bias.

If the Hermano’s club did something bad would Luis tell us about it honestly?  I’m certain he would from a personal relationship with him, but the fact that there could even be a doubt to the readers is why he couldn’t write about his own club.  It’s a question of journalistic ethics, and if you readers doubt our objectivity then we’re not doing our job correctly.

So while Luis can’t write about his club, he can inform other people about events it is holding and he’d be able to push on it alot better than someone coming from the outside.  It’s alot more acceptable to us if Luis nags about an article rather than someone from the outside.

However, as I said in the last post on this topic, nothing can get an article in our paper for sure.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try though.  Bar nothing the most effective way to get an article into our paper is to join us and write it yourself.

You might have to work against the staff, but it’s still way easier to change a system from the inside than it is from the outside.

You don’t have to have a clear reason though to join us.  Most of us are here because we’ve chosen this as our major, others because we enjoy it, and me for the people really.  So please join journalism, we’re gonna need you next semester.

Project planning

Well I’m sorry I’ve been pushing this thing too much, but now we have a live action webcam watching us in the newsroom!!!!  Ok, i’m done plugging that.  Instead i’m going to be talking about project planning at the Skyline View.

Project planning is the act of using multiple elements, pictures, graphs, or sidebars, that are normally separate in a newspaper page, and putting them all together into one coherant story.

This allows you to make a story that can draw readers in with one or two graphics, and have them read the rest of the writing on your page.  It’s kind of an undercover way of making people read what you want to read.  Every story should do this because no one likes to read a wall of text.

Some people, however, don’t love project planning as much as I do.  They believe it dumbs down the article, but I don’t follow that.  Some things can only be given to your audience with graphics.  The best way to get across the story of who won yesterday’s election is to show an electoral map of this country because that is how the elections are decided.

Also one of the best things about project planning is that it can be done with anything and anywhere.  Although it’s most obvious in our print edition it can also be done online, and with even more stuff!  For instance our Prop. 8 protest article has one video, one slideshow, and two pictures, in addition to a six hundred word article!

However, we here have some problems with project planning online.  College Publisher severely constrains our ability to do original things because it has strict space constraints that mess everything up if we’re not incredibly accurate.  That’s why the pictures in the article are above everythings else, it’s not cause we planned it.  It’s College Publisher’s fault.

Ah, the story of our online edition.

Story Placement

This is kind of a lesson for the uninitiated into the wonderful world of journalism, but I’m going to talk about how news stories get into our newspaper.

The reason I’m covering this is because different groups come into our newsroom and we get emails all the time asking us to cover stories. I’m the one who represents our paper, and as such I’m the one who fields complaints about why such and such story didn’t get covered, or why it was placed where it was placed. So with this little entry I hope to make it clear as to how our paper works from a story acquisition perspective.

Our news stories come from several sources:

• Skyline Shines: the college president’s newsletter always gives great ideas
• Localizing other paper’s ideas: nothing wrong with this, it’s a different story, but I still don’t like this option
• Press releases: These are rarely useful for us because most of them are advertising spam.
• Us: we come up with a lot of the ideas for our news section by thinking and stuff.

Our staff is composed of about fifteen writers, and a twelve-page issue typically requires a little more than 36 stories. Split into our five sections we only have about three pages of news which is eight stories or so for that section, on a good day.

Obviously with these issues we aren’t going to be able to cover everything on our campus, and so it comes down to choices, what is the most newsworthy item that we know about at the time?

That question is up to us to answer. We’re the ones putting in the time and effort for this, and we’re the ones trained for these things. I honestly do apologize to people who are disappointed when we don’t cover something because we’ve missed something and disappointed the people on our campus.

So here are ways to help in getting a story covered:

• Doing something: A lot of our stories are event based because that supplies graphics for our stories, and also provides a kind of realization in readers like, “oh, so that’s what that was.”
• Talk to us: If an event is happening we need to know, we can’t be everywhere and we don’t always have the expertise required to tell when something is the most important to another group.
• Advertise with us: This especially goes to groups on campus. It is seriously like twelve dollars for a business card sized ad in our paper, if you are a club, and clubs on campus get five hundred a year from SACNAS. It’s chump change, and can really show off what your cause is about.
• Please don’t get mad: As I said we can’t cover everything and I’m sorry for that, but coming in pissed to us doesn’t instantly, get you a story for the next issue.

These methods will not get you a story for sure, but they certainly increase the chances a lot.

motivation

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Well not much is going to change with our paper this week. We’ve been stricken with a bout of lethargy over here, although we did put up a couple of videos on our website last week.

Those and all future videos we put will go under the multimedia heading on our front page. There you will be able to see various movies and slideshows such as our slideshow on Dia de la Raza, or our production video camera, which we will be filming for again this week.

These elements show how we are improving with our ability to get news out faster. The past two weeks we have mainly been putting things up for our online things, and those things are more time consuming. Also we have had the print edition of our paper planned out for the past week or so, which obviously makes some of the harder things a little bit easier.

This week these side projects have left us no time to work on improving different elements of our paper. We should be changing some more fonts in our paper, but due to the other things that my colleagues and I have been working on we haven’t gotten to them.

These articles would have been finished by now though, if not for our other problem: motivation in our newsroom.

My specific problem is this; it’s hard to keep people motivated for something that they are going to be doing eight times over the space of a school semester. I find it hard to motivate myself most of the time.

Part of the problem is the unrestricted access we have to computers. The internet is quite a double edged sword. On one hand we have access to all the knowledge we will ever need, and a near limitless ability to reach the people we need to talk to for our articles. The access to the pool of knowledge allows us to do our articles faster, but also to procrastinate longer, giving us wayyyy to much time to screw around. So, on the other hand though we have access to just as many games and distractions such as Youtube and flash game sites.

The other part of my problem is that the newspaper is for the most part my social life, sad as that is. This makes me way too entertained by the people in the newsroom and so I can never concentrate in there. I know it’s this way with some of the other people on my staff because they go into our back room, but the socializing still goes on in there. There’s no escaping it.

So I have to go back to my house, which has more distractions by the way. Despite all of this, I’m actually a very productive writer. If I have my sources already, I can bang out an article in 45 minutes. It’s just the getting in the mood that is the hard part. For example this has been written in about that length of time, but I’ve been “working on it” all day.

Now we come to my point in writing this. This has obviously been quite a rambling edition of the View From Here, ok more rambly than most of them. However, this one does have a point, and that is to show you, our readers, that we’re just like you guys. We have the same problems with motivation, and procrastination that you do.

The reason I share this with you is because people don’t trust the media anymore, and I feel that opening our production process should help you relate to what we feel, and do here at the Skyline View.

Bylines

Man, that production video feed took forever. As we ‘speak’ I’m uploading it to YouTube in order to embed it on our website. Unfortunately it’s only four minutes, but we have a minute one that we’re sitting on, to possibly be used later.
This week for production we’ll probably do the same, but be a lot less ambitious and shoot a lot less video in order to make it easier to edit and put through our process. I’d kinda like to apologize to you, our readers, because this took way longer than I thought it would, and that’s mainly my fault, due to procrastination and other things.
And now after I’ve finished the rest of my article it’s still not loaded….. God I hate this thing, I’m gonna call in Adriane Desiderio.

However, the thing I mean to talk about now is in our print edition, and that is the way we are changing the paper. In case you haven’t noticed, we changed our headline fonts for this last issue. It looks like it’s a hit with the readers because our papers are flying off of the stands.
For this we chose 3 different fonts, one serif, one sans serif, and one crazy one. What the reason behind choosing these fonts is to brand our paper. We’re trying to make our paper look more professional and we felt the old fonts, or I should say font, weren’t doing it and our paper looked rather amateurish for no real reason.
The reason we moved to three different fonts is it adds variety to our pages. It allows us to show what is the top story on the page by what font is used, and it helps separate those stories out from other ones. This simple change is part of the overall redesign of our paper that has been taking place since last semester.
The reason our paper was changed last semester was because, we figured out from the semester before that, we only had one story above the fold line that easily viewable for our readers. We changed it to throw as many pictures and stories above the fold line as we possibly could, and in our newest edition we have the starts of four stories, and three pictures above the fold line.
This makes people pick up more papers because they see the pretty pictures, and out last semester proved this with us getting less of our papers back than before. Also last semester we had John Harrison design some new items in our paper, changing the look of the sections through the new items.
This semester now we want to complete this redesign, and we’re phasing it in. It started with the headlines, and in this issue, we have new bylines. Bylines that look professional, and not like the bulky versions from before, and in our next issue we hopefully be changing something even more basic, so just compare issue 4 and issue 5 to see the difference.

Production camera update

Ok, so here’s the third post for The View From Here.  It’s online week again and I’m going to cover the our production camera.

 

In the print edition I gave an update as we were filming in order to provide a little more to my readers, and also because we needed a little more content J.  However, it isn’t just as simple as I wanted the filming and production to be.

 

This is because our camera was practically made by alien engineers to give an orgasm to whoever looks through the screen on the camera.  It is a Cannon HG10, an HD camcorder that cost our department almost $1000 dollars.  From it not only can we record HD video, but we can also take single frames to use as photos.  There is a problem though.  We didn’t look at what software we had to have to use it.

 

Our camcorder records it’s files in a .mts format.  Currently you need the newest generation of film editing software to edit that and it’s very hard to change formats into one we can edit.

 

Our old features editor, Adriane Desiderio, found a way to do it that basically involves ripping it into it’s component parts, such as the sound and video.  Then it changes the video around into one format, and finally we put it back together into an mpg for editing in windows movie maker or final cut pro.

 

This process is fine as long as we have only a few short things to process, but our current problem is we took about 3 hours of video.  The camera splits the clips up into 1.9 gigabyte pieces, which are incredibly huge.  It took over an hour for me to process one clip in this arcane process.

 

Therefore our production cam shall be made of only two clips with an estimated time of about 45 minutes.  Cutting this down should be easy because we have a lot of dead time in there, due to our productivity.  The content of it is also pretty much free from swearing, which surprised me.  There are a few isolated incidents, so I’m going to leave them in instead of editing our little movie to death.

 

We should have it up by Wednesday or Friday, and I’ll be interested to know what  you think of it.

Production Night Video

So this week I’ll be featuring something new with our print edition, actually though I will be talking about something that may be new to production night.

 

 

Normally on production night some crazy stuff happens.  We are essentially trapped in these two rooms from 12 p.m. to 10 p.m.  It gets way more insane with about four to five hours.  For instance words start looking wrong, even when they are spelled correctly, and strange poems get written for thumbs up/thumbs down.  In essence, things are done, words are spoken, and actions are taken.  Such as this:  TEAM BUILDING EXERCISE #2!!!

 

 

 

 

Ok, that obviously wasn’t on production night, we just took it today on the spur of the moment, but that was only with about an hour of craziness being stuck together.  Where am I going with this?  A production night video feed to capture the insanity.

On Wednesday night not only will we be putting together our paper we will be filming for a video feed to be released sometime after our print edition comes out.  Hopefully we will be half as amusing to you guys as we are to ourselves.

The View From Here Production

Hey it’s Nick Donofrio from the Skyline View, and here is the new view from here

Well if you’re reading this you’ve already figured out what’s new to our website, and that is going to be the subject of this blog, new things we are doing to the paper. My View From Here column, which was formerly just a space for me to rant, is now going to be on the subject of changing aspects of our newspaper, why that is happening, and where it will going to go in the future.

For the first week I will put up something new about our website, and for next week I will be putting up something new about the print edition.

The subject of this week is blogs. We are going to add 3 or 4 blogs to our websites from topics such as new aspects in technology, to a blog on Skyline Sports. These blogs should provide a consistent source of new content for our paper.

Also we are going to add a little section on the side of our page that will allow us to quickly and intuitively link you to our blogs through a Google gadget, inspired by the Talonmarks newspaper of Cerritos College.

In the future we could add more Google gadgets to our page, mainly because they look cool and make our paper more accessible. If you want to suggest any gadgets we should add feel free to e-mail us at skyline_view@hotmail.com. So that’s this week, see you next week when I write about the possibility of a production night web cam.

Future blog topics;

Video newsroom

Cracking our website

New things on our website every week

New things in our paper every week