Charles Apple

Two Tampa-area weeklies are seeking some design help: The Florida Courier and the Daytona Times. The former is a 12-page weekly; the latter publishes 8 pages a week.

The word comes from John Telford, late of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He left his job this summer and moved to Orlando to start his own design firm.

John took on design duties for the two weeklies but then ran into technical issues. He advised them to advertise with SND for a replacement, and they did. Then their ad disappeared.

It’s back up, but John wonders if we could help out by giving them a plug here in the blog.

The Daytona Times, established 32 years ago, is published on Thursdays and usually runs eight pages. It circulates about 15,000 copies in the Daytona Beach area.

The Florida Courier publishes Fridays and normally runs 12 pages in two sections. It’s been around 19 years and circulates 10,000 copies. It had primarily covered the Treasure Coast area of Florida but was relaunched two years ago to aim for a statewide audience. Read more about the history of the company here.

The want ad states, in part:

On a weekly basis, we would send you a grid with each paper’s weekly configuration in Word documents, plus pictures to your ftp or ours. Copy for the week generally comes in from Thursdays to Wednesday evening.

You will download, lay out, and return to us as pdfs which we proof, edit, and return to you with list of necessary corrections. Deadline for both newspapers is midnight Eastern Standard Time (US) on Wednesday night/Thursday morning.

John says:

The design of the papers was established by Ed Hashey back in 2006. I’m not sure what Ed is up to these days, but he was with Garcia Media and did quite a bit of instruction/teaching for the Poynter Institute.

The ad states:

Maintaining excellence throughout in graphic design is important. Our preference is for a team of designers to work on this project, rather than have one full-time designer who would be subject to illness, sudden emergencies, etc. We understand that two experienced part-time designers could get the job done.

And John adds:

Charles Cherry — the editor and publisher of both papers — and his staff are very friendly and easy to work with. They have been incredibly accommodating with every request we’ve had, and I really can’t recommend this job more highly. It is a fantastic opportunity for someone.

Everything is done remotely and tailor-made for working from home, and though the job posting says they’re looking for a team of designers, I think a single, experienced designer could easily handle the project if they wanted to make it their full-time job.

John explains what happened and why he has to give up the gig himself:

My little design firm picked up this project about six weeks ago. It’s not exactly the kind of job that we’ve been focusing on with our company, but we obviously had newspaper design experience and we thought it might be a good fit for us, especially since we were looking to expand our client base.

Our only problem has been that the job has unearthed some issues with my new cable internet connection here in Orlando that were not obvious before due to the kind of work we typically do for our clients. The design job for the Florida Courier and the Daytona Times is pretty much a deadline-driven job, as is all newspaper work, but the daily proofs and uploads to FTP sites revealed that my connection is trailing off, slowing down and sometimes conking out completely in the evening. This was not a problem for us with other clients, as we have absolutely no issues with the connection during normal business hours.

To make a long story short, there’s not much the cable company can do for me to fix it, and DSL isn’t an option at our location. Because of this I felt it just wasn’t viable to continue to try to do this work for the two newspapers as we just never knew when or how severe our connection failures were going to be. With such a deadline-driven production, it just wasn’t fair, in my opinion, as we would be unable to give a reliable level of service to the owners of these papers.

I also cannot express how understanding Charles Cherry, the editor and publisher of both papers has been in this situation. I feel bad for leaving him hanging on the project, and we have agreed to work around these issues until he can find a replacement.

If anyone out there is interested in taking this on, I’m more than happy to answer any questions they may have or give more details. As I said, I think this is a tremendous project and some lucky individual or small group of designers is going to be able to really take this and run with it.

Like it says in the ad, send your resumé and work samples to Charles Cherry at the Florida Courier/Daytona Times in Tampa. You’ll find the address in the want ad. Or e-mail Mr. Cherry here: ccherry2 [at] aol.com.If you’d like to talk to John, contact him here: jtelford [at] bing.biz.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 10:41 am and is filed under News design, Newspapers, Recruiting, Small papers, Visual Editors, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.