The importance of layout has changed drastically as the AFHS Patriot Press has shifted from both print and online publication to only online thanks to the COVID pandemic, but foreseeing an eventual return to print publications using Publisher, layout remains a necessity. Knowledge of layout in the online edition is also a must.
This editorial guide aims to guide primarily Patriot Press editors as they strive to teach staff members the pillars of layout. The guide will be split into two sections: print and online.
Print Edition Using Publisher
New editors may be unfamiliar with Publisher thanks to this past year of using only Wix (and Webnode) for publishing. Here are some basic things to know about Publisher and the editor responsibilities that come with using publisher:
Publisher can only be accessed on school computers and laptops.
There is a shared drive accessible through the school computers, called "Newspaper", that newspaper staff can access. This is where each issue of the newspaper can be accessed.
Each issue, it is one of the editors' responsibilities to create a new shell. To do this, take one of the old issues, create a copy, and place it in a new folder titled for the new issue. Then, go into this new copy and delete all the old content. Leave in place the table of contents, headers, titles, and bylines, because these will be replaced later with the new titles.
Make folders for photography, rough drafts, and final drafts. This may change next year if editors choose to keep rough drafts and photography on Google Drive.
Important Things to Learn and Teach Staff
Staff members must know how to drop in articles and bleed from one text box to another.
Teach staff how to generate their own captions based on a light read of the article (tell them that the writer of the article usually doesn't write photo captions--the layout person does).
Create a cheat-sheet type document that gives staff the rules for writing captions, because captions should be the same format in the print edition. Print edition captions may differ from online captions.
For example, print edition: Captions have a period at the end. Photo credit is not in caption; instead it is tilted sideways along the picture. Proper capitalization.
For example, online edition : Captions have period at the end. Photo credit is in the caption.
Print out final draft of the issue and allow staff members to go through it with you to mark up grammar errors, cut-offs, and typos. Big picture items, glaring errors, and quick fixes are usually the only things that should be pointed out at this stage. Newbies tend to have trouble with this--they make the mistake of in the FINAL DRAFT pointing out word choice, paragraph structure, title ideas, and syntax. These are not things that are changed at this stage.
Teach staff picture edits like how to make pictures black and white, how to change transparency, how to resize, how to copy and paste using ctrl+c and ctrl+v
Online edition on Wix
Staff members usually do less work on layout, as the online editors do everything for the online. It's pretty hands-off for regular staff members. Here are some tips to pass along to the online editors:
Stay away from the WIX editor or WIX adi (this changes the layout of the entire website) unless you need to make big changes, like section titles or number of blog posts that show on each page. These changes are hard to revert.
For month to month issue publishing, you only need to use the blog function. No need to go into the WIX editor. There is a cheat sheet for publishing on the blog on the Patriot Press Google Drive.
For when you do eventually need to go into the WIX editor (it may be called WIX adi, I can't remember): don't despair! It has a learning curve but it's not as complex as it may initially seem. Make use of the WIX user forums.
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