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Scott Gardner![Offline]( "Offline")  Tiki Lounger Joined: 31 Oct 2005 Total posts: 16 Location: Hamilton, Ontario, CANADA Age: 43 Gender: Male
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Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 4:30 pm |
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I'm looking for input from various organizations about how the process for determining your A1 plays out each day. Who decides the main art? When do you meet to plan? Who has input? What role do the designers play? Anything and everything about how the day in the visuals department plays out to where a final A1 is created would be of interest.
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Rob Weir![Offline]( "Offline")  Visual Guru Joined: 23 Feb 2006 Total posts: 52 Location: Columbia, MO Age: 31 Gender: Male
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Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2007 9:13 am |
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Here's how we do it at the Columbia Missourian. We're the daily newspaper published by the Missourian Publishing Association, and we serve as a teaching lab for the Missouri School of Journalism. So we have student reporters/copy editors/designers/photographers supervised by a professional staff. And, as a bonus, our entire student staff (~ 300 total) turns over every four months.
We usually run a two-section paper (news & sports), but there's a fair amount of space to fill. We're a nonprofit, and don't have much advertising. So we usually have a 1A, open Second Front, open jump space and some wire pages.
Every Friday, the professional editors have a planning meeting to sketch out future 1A centerpieces. We strive to plan two weeks out, which doesn't always happen. But the goal is to have an idea on the board for each 1A for a couple of weeks, which, of course, can change later.
We have two budget metings a day: one at 11 a.m. and one at 3 p.m. The 11 a.m. meeting is partly a critique session and partly a planning meeting, in which reporters can pitch stories for later in the day/week. The goal of that meeting is to come out with at least two centerpieces, one for 1A and one for Second Front. If that doesn't happen, we start enterprising/scrambling. (Breaking news, obviously, is handled as it comes.) Reporters are supposed to send budget lines to their editors, and often do. City eds forward those to a Hotmail account that all our assistant city editors (students) can check. The Jefferson City bureau also sends in budget lines via e-mail. An ACE comes up with a printed budget by 3 p.m.
Most of the 1A deciding is done at 3 p.m. Basically what happens is that the city editors, ME, night news editor, photo editor, student designers, student wire editors, student photo editors and student ACEs gather in the conference room. (We usually have some students from other classes as well, so we can get attendance figures of 30-40 on occasion.) From there, it's pretty simple: eds pitch stories, we ask questions, take a look at art, argue for a bit and make the sausage.
Since we're the No. 2 newspaper in a very small market, we try to avoid wire news at all costs. Usually, we shoot for 5 stories on the front, unless we're unusually tight on space or have a large refer package at the top or bottom of the front. (Fridays are usually tight, as we always tese to our Saturday TMC and always tese to Tiger football in season.)
Centerpiece decisions are usually reached via consensus. The ME, or whoever's sitting in for him, is the tiebreaker. We have a slight bias toward stories over art, though it's nearly 50-50 these days. Often if the story isn't good enough, we'll use the art as a centerpiece refer to the story inside.
Obvious front-page topics for us are education (college town), transportation, public safety, government. But we'll take interesting features for centerpieces fairly often. Sports stories can make their way out there as well, as when the MU-KU football game moved to Kansas City for two years, or when we fired our basketball coach, or when an MU wrestler won a national championship. But that's not as common.
We do have a fair number of design-driven centerpieces. Our design editor, Joy Mayer, has done a great job at training our city eds to think about alternative story forms for stories that deal with a lot of numbers, concepts, etc. Lisa Clausen (of the Strib, formerly of the LA Times, KC Star, etc.) spent the last year here on a fellowship, and pushed some quizzes, feature treatments, cool stuff for the front. That's more often the result of some advance planning than on-the-fly planning, due to the fact that our students take a while to get up to speed.
After budget, of course, things fall off and on the budget. Once the ME's gone, the night news editor is the final decider of what's 1A-worthy, and he or she will use his or her best news judgment to get us out by midnight. We very rarely change up a centerpiece after the 3 p.m. meeting, but it's not unknown. More often, the changes are to story play or placement within the edition.
Is this useful at all? Do you want more specifics about any part of the process? If so, let me know.
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Mike Braun![Offline]( "Offline")  Contributing editor Joined: 10 Jul 2004 Total posts: 185 Location: Fort Myers News-Press Age: 53 Gender: Male
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Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 6:49 pm |
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At the News-Press, A1 starts with a mid-morning meeting of the dayside staff to get the budget ball rolling. At 3:30 the ME and dept. heads from various depts. (features, graffics, photo, etc.) gather and we have our full-blown budget meet and make up a tentative A1 lineup of stories, art, graphics, reefers and other promos. At 5:30 the A1 and metro designers, the night metro editor, photo and grafffics gather and the "real" budget is formed and we go through what changes have happened since 3:30, what changes might happen and any other pertinent issues. We then break and the A1 designer does his or her thang. That's the "simple" discription. The more complicated version involves many many many more people and other input by LOTS AND LOTS of other people. Fortunately, most of them go home before the A1 designer (me, four days a week, and the usual metro editors the other three) gets into the meat of the design. Usually.
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Billy Simkins![Offline]( "Offline") Contributing editor Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Total posts: 112 Location: Bakersfield Age: 36 Gender: Male
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Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 11:38 am |
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We have our budget meeting at 3:30 p.m. We choose the best stories and look at the photos. There are times when the game changes as development rolls along. I always say, how can you choose the best picture without seeing the headline next to it or how it plays with the story? There have been many times that a photo wasn't as good in the budget meeting but it ended up playing much better in the package. I'm lucky enough to get the green light on most of my stuff. I think they trust me for the most part.
One thing I always tell new designers. If you're going to go for it, go for it like you mean it. Just make sure it doesn't suck when your done.
bs
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Scott Gardner![Offline]( "Offline") Tiki Lounger Joined: 31 Oct 2005 Total posts: 16 Location: Hamilton, Ontario, CANADA Age: 43 Gender: Male
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Posted: Wed Jun 27, 2007 7:12 am |
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Thanks for the responses. Lots of good info but it seems that everyone does the meeting thing virtually the same way.
What I was hoping to get at was who calls the shots on the package. Is the visual department at your paper driving the design or is it an over-zealous ME who thinks he knows design?
I'm having a bit of a battle where we identify our main "package" completely separate of the visual possibilities for it and then get told that it is my problem to "come up with something". If it is a huge story and the visual is weak you just have to go with it but if we are juggling great visuals and good stories the balance doesn't seem to shift the other way. The story is what decides things around here and I tend to think that is not necessarily the best way to design our front.
I'm curious as to how that plays out at other papers and how much clout your visuals team has in determining the look of the front.
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