Goal
I entered the Algonquin College Journalism program to learn as much as possible about being a reporter and designing, producing, and printing newspapers.
Opportunity
The first semester focused on print journalism, which was my area of interest. During this period we had to write articles that were published in the school’s weekly student newspaper, Impact. I also volunteered to work on producing the newspaper.
In mid-October, Impact‘s managing editor left, and I decided to apply for the position. I did this for two reasons: First, because the newspaper was closely tied to the journalism department, I could ask for help from the journalism teachers, who had both worked for major newspapers. Second, the job would give me experience in print publishing that went far beyond the curriculum for the first semester of the Journalism program. I also completed the first semester of the program, finishing with an A- average.
Project
Partly to save money and partly because the other semesters of the program focused on radio and TV, I decided not to continue with the Journalism program. Instead, during the second semester, I focused on developing the newspaper.
Producing the newspaper on time was challenging. Our campus was located in western Ottawa, Ontario. Typesetting was taken care of by a company located downtown, 15 kilometres away. Printing was done in Smith Falls, about one hour away. We did not have computers.
Articles and photographs were submitted to the newspaper on Mondays and Tuesdays. I and four associate editors reviewed the copy and pictures, decided what would run, wrote headlines, estimated the printed length of each article, and roughed out the design.
Wednesday evening, I took the articles over to the typesetting studio and waited until one or two in the morning for the output of the galleys. I learned a lot about type while talking to the typesetters and was very impressed by their typing speed.
I came back to the college as early as I could on Thursday morning and began to lay out the newspaper. The associate editors would come in and help if they did not have other things to do. We had to cut up the typeset galleys, crop and size the photos (which usually involved some darkroom work), and paste all the elements in place on the paste-up boards.
Pasting up the newspaper usually took all day and into the evening. Once the paste-up was completed, I drove to Smith Falls to deliver it, sometimes arriving just minutes before the midnight deadline.
After two high stress days of endless work, I would get home around 2:00 AM and finally get some relaxed sleep. When I got back to work early Friday morning, the printed newspapers would be waiting for us, and we would distribute them throughout the campus. Volunteers on the other campuses would do the same.
Tension between the student union and the journalism department over who should run the newspaper had been growing for the past couple of years. At the end of the semester, the newspaper officially became the student union’s responsibility. This gave me an opportunity to suggest some changes I believed were necessary to streamline production and improve the learning experience for volunteers.
I had noticed that the graphics department had a typesetting machine with a terminal and output device for producing the typeset galleys. After I talked to the head of the graphics department and the student union manager, we agreed that typesetting should be moved in house.
This decision allowed me to offer students work with computers and hands-on typesetting experience. The decision would also save a lot of money, some of which could be put toward buying a $13,000 typesetting terminal to put in the office, which was moved over Christmas into the main campus building.
With the terminal in the office, raw stories could be input as we received them, edited, coded for typesetting, and saved on disk. On Wednesday evening, instead of going downtown, we would take the disks down to the graphics department and output the galleys. This process worked well, giving us a great deal more flexibility. With the old system, once we had the galleys from the typesetting company, we could only fix big mistakes, minor errors had to be accepted. Now, we would simply rerun a story to correct an error or make it shorter or longer if it did not fit. Also, headlines could be written as we were laying the newspaper out.
Another benefit of bringing production in house was we had more time to work on the design of each week’s paper, which allowed us to be more ambitious. I worked through 1981, deciding at the end of the year that it was time to move on.
I produced around 35 issues as editor of the newspaper, writing dozens of stories and editing hundreds more. Most of the time, I had fun.
