Let me tell you how laying out the Yale Daily News works. Ever since I became a Production & Design Editor last week, my life has been consumed by producing the paper.
The News runs Monday through Friday, with production every night from Sunday to Thursday in 202 York Street. Each night, one P&D editor leads and others on our six-person team, as well as "staffers" (people who have joined the News as staff members through a semester-long process of "heeling") and "trainees" (newcomers to our building), come in for hours-long shifts. I co-lead with my friend and colleague on Sundays and Thursdays, and we design the alternative Weekend section of the paper that is published on Fridays. We are also in charge of Mag, or the Yale Daily News Magazine, which comes out periodically with fiction and extended pieces and which is laid out on weekends.
On lead nights, we get to the building at around 6 p.m. We attend a process called "doping" that, contrary to the sound of the name, is a monotonous process of discussing with the MEs (Managing Editors), EIC (Editor-in-Chief), and desk editors (News, University, Sci-Tech, Culture, and Opinion section editors) what content will be in the next day's issue. A workflow, or Google Sheet of all the information, is created. The main concern of P&D editors during these meetings is to find out what articles will go on each page. We also discuss graphics to fit onto the pages: photographs, illustrations, and WEDs (visual representations of information such as graphs and maps that take P&D editors forever to make).
After doping, we log onto our K4 server accounts on the YDN computers in what we call the 2-Room, alongside the MEs and EIC. Photo and Illustrations editors come in later. We create the pages of the paper using templates on Adobe InDesign. We start to fill in the dates and page numbers in the corners of the pages, and we start to lay out the cover page.
In the early hours of the night, before 10 p.m., layout of the paper is relatively easy. We drag "dummy text" into the pages — nonsensical Latins words that fill up space until real articles are submitted by reporters. We make boxes for photos and graphics and make WEDs. We put in caption boxes underneath and check them into K4 for desk editors to see. We train some trainees. There is a food trade at 9 p.m., which involves two or so people in the building picking up food from a restaurant that has agreed to sponsor us.
Then, later in the night, after hours have slid by in dragging of objects from one folder to another, moving and rearranging objects to look decent, and choosing mood-appropriate songs on Spotify, we tackle the details. A trainee has made an error such as leaving less than two "picas" (or grid boxes) between objects; we fix it. An article has switched pages; we move it. A photo has finally come in; we drag it in and write the photographer's name into the caption. After all has been done on our end, we wait to press Shift-Option-Command-U so we can see updates from desk editors who have finally entered in articles and copy editors have finally checked them over for errors. When "Ready for web?" appears on K4, we print the pages and hand them to the MEs.
The MEs look them over. Are the headlines long enough? Are there unnecessary or incorrect words on the page? Are the photos clear instead of blurry? When corrections have been made in ink, we manually enter them onto the pages. We make PDF versions in folders entitled the date of the issue. We wait for another editor to proof them, and then the MEs to send them to the publisher. We all wait for them to be received.
By the time we leave the building after deadline, it is around 3 a.m. Where has the time gone? We spend less time sleeping than we do in the building, and when we wake up, the day doesn't really start until 6 p.m.
