Ever wondered what not to wear in a TV studio? Here's what one RTE studio-based show recommends to people appearing on it:
"Solid colours work best. Thin stripes or busy tweeds and prints produce distracting onscreen effects, and white flares up. With our design and lighting, colours like blue, purple and red look well and a casual approach tends to suit the tone of the programme."
That's it. Polka dots for me, if I'm ever asked. And a hat, and flashy jangly jewellery. And something to make a moiré pattern.
They even teach this stuff in colleges. Proper order too. See here.
They say Ireland is a small place. On the train and in the station the other day I bumped into not one but three journalists I'd worked with in various newspapers over the years.
The first one (no names, cos this would have been off the record) was absolutely livid that his former editor in the Irish Times had not only a nice pension, AND a goodbye package like the rest of the staff who'd taken early retirement, AND a house which he'd bought off the paper... he was also getting a special 100,000-euros-a-year-package, under a "non-compete" agreement. AND he's getting it until 2014, and it's index-linked.
Why this former editor should get over a million euros after what he had done to the paper was totally beyond my friend who still works in the place. It's beyond me too. But that's the "culture" and "ethics" of the Irish Times for you.
The second person I bumped into on the train to Galway was Ronnie. Ronnie and Cormac both worked like trojans in the Dublin Daily's newsroom, and they were both great organisers. A great duo, salt of the earth, as they say. We compared notes about all the work we'd got (or rather the lack of it) since the demise of the DD, and I don't think Ronnie's a millionaire at the moment. In fact he's probably even more broke than me. Still, he was in good spirits and said he thoroughly enjoyed reading about the Caravaggio scam by P45.net (when we were in the Dublin Daily, I'd notice the P45 urban legends about to creep into the paper, so I'd give Ronnie a discreet warning about their, er, dubious provenance).
The third person was a freelance going down to Galway for the weekend. She says the Irish Times is actually laying off regular freelances at the moment, because (a) it's still broke after the restructuring and (b) it doesn't want to be stymied by the new legislation which means people who work regularly for a company over 12 months or whatever can't be casualised for ever and have to be offered a staff contract. She also asked my advice about PCs (look, I don't know that much about PCs, but most journalists seem to know even less than me, and because I used to write a newspaper column or two about PCs they think I'm some kind of techie guru. I'm not, really, I'm not).
Anyway, her PC had just given up the ghost, what should she do, did I know anyone with a secondhand laptop, she didn't have too much steady work at the moment, the credit card is maxed, and she doesn't have the wherewithal to buy a new machine in the near future. And with no PC it's pretty hard to file copy. She's contemplating living in a cybercafe. I don't think she's a millionaire either.
A couple of people asked me asked recently why we needed to collect money for RAM for P45.net. Here's the financial breakdown of the site. Basically Hosting365.ie sponsors the site with a cheap server, I'll rephrase that, a server at a cheap price. In addition we add the costs of the email service we give our users (this costs us a monthly fee). It's been some time since we generated any amount of cash from paying adverts, which is why when Google started doing their ads service we leapt at the chance to use it. Unfortunately what we gain from Google still doesn't pay for the hosting and email. Ergo P45.net is still one loss-making enterprise - as we have to pay for the hosting out of our own funds most months, we really couldn't afford the money for the RAM.
Julian Behal is a great newspaper photographer. Along with Garret Brennan, he took the bulk of the photos in the Dublin Daily (RIP), and you could always rely on Julian to come up with a damn good pic that you could use big time, four or five colummns. The people on the picture desk would light up when he came into the room with his latest snaps and put some new CD of noisy stuff on the stereo.
Anyway, just heard that Jules was the photographer with architect Duncan Stewart this week to Belarus, when Stewart had a very bad fall and ended up in hospital.
Keep an eye out for Julian's photos of the trip. Feck, that sounds in really bad taste. I mean, keep an eye out for Julian's photos of the journey.
The Irish edition of the Daily Mirror is doing my head in at the moment. As redtops go, it has some things going for it. I used to buy it for things like...
its Code Challenge crossword (the one where you don't get any clues - just numbers for letters). I'm afraid I'm a crossword junkie, so I'd buy it for the crossword alone
and Amy Vickers's daily Internet update - which is now sadly gone, so the main coverage is unfortunately back to Carol Countdown Cleverclogs Vorderman
its soccer coverage isn't that bad as redtops go - especially on Mondays, and now on Saturdays with its Football Confidential pullout
then there was its prickly anti-war stance in the run-up to the Iraq war
and that bloke's TV column
and the Saturday TV guide
and I'd be a sucker for one or two of its CDs or DVDs, such as the BBC comedies it's doing.
Oh, and the news. Its Irish news wasn't too bad at times either, snappy and breaking a surprising amount of stuff before the broadsheets.
But the last three days of Diana mania has been waaaaaaaaay too much.
On Monday they had:
"WORLD Exclusive"
"DIANA LETTER SENSATION"
"They're planning 'an accident' in my car so Charles can marry again"
"FULL ASTONISHING STORY: PAGES 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9"
And if you thought that was it, then there was yesterday's front page:
"EXCLUSIVE: PHILIP'S AMAZING LETTERS TO DIANA"
"'I can't imagine anyone in their right mind leaving you for Camilla'"
"PAUL BURRELL: BOOK OF THE CENTURY - MORE SENSATIONAL REVELATIONS: PAGES 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 & 11"
And by this morning they were milking it for all its worth:
"WORLD EXCLUSIVE: NEW BURRELL BOMBSHELL"
"SPENCER'S VILE LETTER TO DIANA"
"'I pray you're getting treatment for your mental problems. You are manipulative and deceitful'"
"MORE AMAZING REVELATIONS FROM THE BOOK OF THE CENTURY: PAGES 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 & 11"
I don't care. The Princess Di stuff means very little to me, the conspiracy theories, the in-fighting, the diets and the trysts and the adulterers. But the Mirror just can't let go. What's the betting that it has at least half a dozen of itsng pages devoted to the rubbish tomorrow morning too?
I've already warned you. I could bore for Ireland about folder structures. Really. I was having pints with my mate Fiachra last Friday and we were actually comparing the merits of different folder structures in various newspapers and mags we've worked in over the years. That's the kind of guys that we are. Mind you, it was the fifth pint. And we didn't get around to something silly like setting up the Irish Association Of Folder Structure Engineers (IAFSE) or what have you.
Anyway, if you're producing a newspaper or magazine or company newsletter thingummy (or even a large website), I've one word of advice, well, nine words actually: never ever underestimate the importance of simple folder structures. And keep an eye on your naming conventions for the folders and for files within them.
Get your folders right, and using them becomes second nature. Get them wrong, and they will be a living hell.
And a central rule is to keep your structure clean and simple.
1. Cheap-and-cheerful can work
Many larger publications have dedicated content management systems, but I'm talking about a cheap-and-cheerful approach: using a hierarchy of shared folders on your server to store stories, pictures and pages.
The folder structure should impose some order on the production process and information flow. You need a lot of order in, say, a 64-page daily publication, with several hundred pictures, even more stories, and dozens of ads too - and perhaps even several editions a day. That's a lot of files flying around at any one time.
There's nothing wrong with cheap-and-cheerful, but only if it's planned well and kept reasonably simple.
2. Intuitive and counterintuitive
Folder structure isn't rocket science, and on the surface everything seems straightforward. Paradoxically, though, when you're planning the system you need to make a few counterintuitive jumps to make it more intuitive to the users. For example...
3. Do things really need to move all around the place?
Each page goes through various stages of production as more bits are added - a layout, subedited copy, prepared pictures, a proofed page, a finished page that has gone through a "distilling" process and finally been sent to the printers.
It seems a bit like a physical production line. So you need to keep track of that page and its associated text/graphical elements as they travel along the production line, going from raw copy and pix to finished PDF files that have been sent down the line to the printers.
So here's our first major counterintuitive jump: why should the page-file move from folder to folder as it's processed?
An initial natural inclination ois to create loads of queues, and push the page from queue to queue as it progresses from "raw" to "cooked". But in practice this creates a much larger and more complicated folder structure. And when things move,
they're much harder to pin down
they can leave a trail of older versions that cause confusion
and the very fact that they're on the move can generate various technical problems, such as broken picture or text links in Quark/Indesign.
So why not keep the page-file in the same place? What could be simpler? Talking of which...
4. Keep it simple
I know, I'm repeating myself, but it's the central and golden rule: always keep the structure as simple as possible.
Some structures are frustrating, time-consuming, far too complicated and hard to grasp. They also leave large gaping spaces for problems, blockages and errors. You don't know where a page is, whether that's the latest version of the page, where its ingredients are, or how to backtrack to their "originals" if the pictures/text have been messed up along the way.
If anything, think about ways to make your structure even simpler again, even though there's a temptation to make it more and more complex.
To give an analogy or two: think of the "typomania" phase that people would go through when DTP first came along - when you're given loads of fonts in a word processing or design package, the initial temptation is to use as many of those fonts as possible in your design, even though they clash with each other and all these competing fonts don't create a very coherent design. It takes time, experience and restraint to see the importance of using a very limited range of typefaces, and the need to keep it simple. (Or I inevitably think of cooking, where you learn to pare things down instead of adding more and more ingredients with their competing flavours/textures/colours: the art is in what you do with just a few simple ingredients).
5. Only give users what they need to use
When designing a system (or a piece of software or a physical interface or whatever) a good idea is to cordon your users off a bit. Only give a particular set of users exactly what they need - no more.
For example, don't bog reporters down or bedazzle them with submenus or subfolders about how many PDFs are left to go to the printers. Most of them are not curious techie types who like trying out every tiny bit of the system: they just want to file that particular story in the right place at the right time, in the correct format and in the simplest and most straightforward way possible.
6. Built it with newcomers in mind, not veterans
The system shouldn't require loads of training or manuals. It shouldn't be aimed only at (a) the most technologically literate or (b) your most permanent staff.
Most newspapers have a sizable amount of casual/freelance workers in the editorial production area. Coupled with high staff turnover rates, that can mean a lot of training, which means a lot of time and money. Keep the system simple and it's easier to learn. Cross-training is easier too.
I don't what to know how one staff member can zoom around an incredible jungle of folders to find a particular sports page. It shouldn't be like that. See how easy it is for a complete outsider (eg a new member of staff, or a freelance sub just around this week to do a couple of shifts) to pick up your structure from scratch and grasp how information flows around your system. Are there too many things to explain? Sounds like your system needs more simplification.
7. Count the clicks
Finally (I told you I could bore for Ireland), here's an example. You might think your structure is obvious and second-nature, but then count the clicks. Count the number of subfolders your typical user has to drill down - and the clicks and scrolls they have to do for a routine task, particularly under pressure and coming up to deadline.
Take, say, a top-level or "level one" hierarchy that goes something like this:
News Desk (unassigned stories)
Picture Desk
Ads
Production
So stories and pix start off at the News Desk or Picture Desk folder (baskets 1 and 2). Finished ads have their own area too (in 3) - probably as a collection of EPS or PDF files. Then everything ends up in Production, where the subeditors and designers get to bash it into finished pages and insert the spelling mistakes and the headlines with bad puns (4). OK, I was joking about the spelling mistakes.
All apparently fine so far, and there might be a few variations on this, such as the need to have separate folders for Sports or Features.
But how do you handle different editions? Do you make the News Desk / Picture Desk /Ads / Production the top-level folders on your server (or even separate partitions), each with subfolders for particular editions? Or - less obviously - should the four News Desk / Picture Desk / Ads / Production divisions be subfolders of a particular edition?
Sorry, I need a graphic here but I'm stuck for time. Put it this way: suppose you're a Sunday newspaper. Should it go like this...
News Desk (unassigned stories)
2003_09_07
2003_09_14
2003_09_21
Picture Desk
2003_09_07
2003_09_14
2003_09_21
Ads
2003_09_07
2003_09_14
2003_09_21
Production
2003_09_07
2003_09_14
2003_09_21
Or should it go more like this:
2003_09_07 *CURRENT EDITION*
News Desk (unassigned stories)
Picture Desk
Ads
Production
2003_09_14
News Desk (unassigned stories)
Picture Desk
Ads
Production
2003_09_21
News Desk (unassigned stories)
Picture Desk
Ads
Production
See what I mean? Same difference? No - the second structure cuts down on the number of layers and levels you have to wade through. In a given week, your staff are going to be primarily concerned with the current edition anyway. So the edition-oriented approach seems to make a lot of sense. The focus is on the latest edition that you're working on, other upcoming editions aren't too far away either. And after you go to print, an entire edition's folders can be shifted into an archive area.
Ten facts and figures I learned from jury duty this past fortnight...
1. They might call 1,000 people for jury duty at a time, but only about a third of that lot turned up for our stint in the Circuit Court. The rest were either exempt or about to be fined (I think it's 63.49 euros). We were kept in an underground waiting area, with loads of TV screens and a live link-up to the judge in the courtroom above and the man pulling our names from the tombola. The judge was very patient and helpful.
2. You're not allowed to serve on a jury if you are over 70, or are a garda or member of the defence forces. Loads of middle-class and white-collar professions and what have you are "excusable as of right" - doctors, dentists, vets, chemists, civil servants, people in holy orders, employees of local authorities, teachers, lecturers and full-time students.
3. The prosecution and defence can each reject up to seven potential jurors without giving any reason. It's very quick, this rejection process. Maybe they have a master list of jurors and their names, numbers, addresses and occupations, and have already categorised them into rejects and must-haves before we even enter the jury box.
4. Once you're selected, your garda escort "confiscates" your mobile phones and locks them in a safe in the jury room. All the other jurors, young and old, had mobiles. I didn't. I feel in a very small minority.
5. We were supposed to be there for up to 10 working days (including the half day they gave us off for a judge's funeral). But if you are sworn into a jury on day one and the trial finishes on, say, day three, they can still call you back to serve on the jury panel during the 10 working days.
6. I served on two juries this time around, straight after each other - and two other people were on the same two juries with me. What's the odds on that? And I was only one of two people in the courtroom on both days who "affirmed" instead of "swearing by almighty God". I didn't want to bring God into it, so I said: "No, I wish to affirm." But just two people out of 24. One in 12. What's the odds on that, in today's post-Catholic Ireland of falling mass attendances etc etc? Perhaps people who would prefer to affirm don't know that they can, or they're too nervous, or they just want to go with the flow and don't want to rock the boat. But the bad thing was that we weren't even told that there was a choice between affirming and swearing on a bible.
7. If you're a serving juror they give you a free lunch: "Twelve Hungry Men", we joked. In the old days, they'd take you to the Clarence Hotel (before U2 did it up). Nowadays they take you in a white garda van to King's Inns. As you pile into the van, you're tempted to put your jacket over your head. All 12 of us had the meat dishes. Not one vegetarian among 12 random adults. Portraits of judges hang down from the walls of the huge dining hall. All men. A fellow juror points out that one of the portraits reminds him of those posters at a bus-stop where somebody has got a big black marker and drawn on the glasses and moustache.
8. The verdict on each count has to be unanimous. There is such a thing as a majority verdict, but you can only give this if the judge has called you back into court and says he/she will accept that kind of verdict.
9. You're not supposed to talk about the details of your case. But in both cases I was involved in (no, I won't be giving details), we didn't hear any evidence whatsoever. In the first one we were packed off to the jury room while there were legal arguments, then we were sent to lunch, and came back, and an hour later the judge called us back in to say he had ruled that there was no case to answer. In the second case the accused then reversed his plea to guilty, and we were brought back and dismissed.
10. You might think that the whole thing is a terrible waste of time for hundreds of people, but it isn't. And I met some really good people on jury duty. Sure, there were one or two complaints about the waiting (particularly in the packed waiting room on the first day), about one or two bits of the ritual that were indecipherable, or about the cost of parking, or about having to get a cert of attendance for your employer, or about this and that. But a handful of us went for a pint when it was all over, and people kept on talking about it being a civic duty. A duty and a right. They emphasised how - for all the system's faults - if they or a member of their family were in the dock, they would want that kind of system. It's random, it's transparent, it's just and fair. Think of all the other countries around the world where the people don't have that right.
Most of my friends and relations have never served on a jury, a lot of people avoid jury duty as a terrible inconvenience. It's an even bigger inconvenience if, say, you've kids to look after, or you're self-employed and losing money for the fortnight. But keep that thought in mind: it's an important right and a duty, a very intrinsic part of a truly democratic society. It's as important as the right to vote.
P45rant.com is down at the moment, despite rebooting the server several times. A MySQL problem. Don't ask. Our hosting people should now be on the case
"MySQL reported this error while trying to retreive the info: Can'tfile: 'thread.MYD'. (errno: 145)"
That's just MySQL's way of saying "Apologies for the disruptions, normal transmission will be resumed as soon as possible, and sorry that I cannot spell 'retrieve'."
Space, the final frontier. The Irish Times building in D'Olier Street and Fleet Street (and maybe even in Westmoreland Street for all I know) is in a permanent state of reconstruction as it rearranges its workspaces. This bit-by-bit process involves a bit of modernisation here, a bit of renovation there, and a bit of colonisation over there.
For example, around the beginning of the 1990s when "new" technology came in (actually it was the Atex system, but everybody called it "new" technology at the time), they tarted up the newsroom. The editor's office on the south side of Fleet Street was scrapped - it was far too small for all the assistant editors that were then being promoted. Most of the manual typewriters disappeared, and the rows of dictation booths (where the copytakers would take copy from reporters over the phone) were also chucked into the skips of history. Around the same time, the Features office on the third floor becameplan, then they added a fourth floor and moved the Features and Sports departments up there, and the library and various other departments expanded and the third floor was no longerplan again.
Terminals were like unrefined Donegal uranium. Many of the freelances had to gravitate to the new fourth floor for a precious terminal, space was already running out again. Then they added a new fifth floor for the caseroom because now they needed the first floor (where the old caseroom was) for a "stacker" for the press, to insert extra pages for bigger papers. Meanwhile there was no room left on the fourth floor for the people on the new Saturday magazine, so they were stuck in another building altogether. As we entered a new millennium, the new press was moved out to Citywest, liberating the ground and first floors again - and the basement where they'd store the giant rolls of paper. Most of the printers had been let go in the interim, and a large chunk of the staff journalists had taken the goodbye package too.
It's quite hard keeping up with the changing Times and its changing property requirements. Over the past two decades it has been buying up the nooks and crannies of the buildings surrounding it (one entire corridor in the I.T. was known for years as "Conway Shipping"). The result of all this staggered modernisation and steady accumulation is that the Irish Times "building" is in fact a cobbled together patchwork of many different buildings and interiors of various vintages
At one time or another the wages department and accounts people and even the property supplement would be at the ends of various dark labyrinths, up one stairs and along and down another stairs and so on, all deep within "the bowels" (as they say) of "the building" (ditto).
According to Irish Times folklore, the very deepest recesses of these dimly lit warrens in the bowels of the building are inhabited by a strange nocturnal animal. This elf-like thing, hardly bigger than a well-fed rat and slightly smaller than the new kid in the creche, is rarely seen. But thanks to one of its more annoying habits it has caused intolerable havoc and damage in the paper over the years. The shadowy creature sneaks into the production department late at night and leaves its mark. Yes, its poo. This may be "a territorial thing", as David Attenborough or David Bellamy or some other David might say. While the city sleeps, the creature distributes its droppings - usually in small, almost identical amounts - throughout the stories of the following day's paper. And because these droppings bear a remarkable resemblance to the shape of a comma - and a comma of the elegant serif variety too, such as Times Roman, 8- or 9-point - this creature has been dubbed the "Comma Fairy".
Only yesterday, the newspaper's management was counting the cost of the Comma Fairy's latest foray. For instance, bang at the start of the front-page lead story the creature had done its dirty deed. By rights, theng sentence should have read something like this:
"Businessman Denis O'Brien has successfully appealed a Revenue Commissioners' challenge to his tax residency status."
But now, thanks to the Comma Fairy's doings, it read:
"The businessman, Mr Denis O'Brien, has successfully appealed a Revenue Commissioners' challenge to his tax residency status, it was learned last night."
The executives skipped the last bit of the sentence. After all, "it was learned last night" could be just a bit of Irish Times-speak. Mind you, there is such a lot of Irish Times-speak nowadays that you'd have to look it up in the Times-speak glossary to see whether "it was learned last night" meant (a) "I'm just back from the courts and we'd better put a bit of distance between ourselves and this one", or (b) "we've read this in a document but we can't actually say that we had our mitts on it", or (c) "Oh dear we didn't get the story first". But where were we? The execs skipped the "learned last night" bit and looked in horror at theng part of the garbled sentence:
"The businessman, Mr Denis O'Brien, has successfully appealed a Revenue Commissioners' challenge to his tax residency status."
Thanks to the Comma Fairy's poo, the sentence had become completely, well, poo too.
A comma provides a short breathing space in a sentence, but the Irish Times Comma Fairy took a special pleasure in inserting its poo just before somebody's name. This created extra breathing spaces, generating all kinds of new meanings. In fact, it made Denis O'Brien sound like he was now the only businessman in the world.
Thanks to the Comma Fairy's droppings, some readers might also feel that they had stumbled into the middle of an ongoing conversation, and that the reference to "The businessman" was stretching back in time - to a "businessman in question", as it were. Picture the conversation in your local pub...
"Pint?"
"Yeah, same again."
"Guess wha'?"
"Wha'?"
"An Irish businessman has appealed against the Revenue Commissioners' challenge to his tax residency status."
"Interesting."
"Yeah, and the businessman [in question], Mr Denis O'Brien, has successfully challenged..."
Actually that's nothing like a real conversation, is it? For example, who uses "Mr" nowadays? "Mr", "Mrs", "Miss" and "Ms" are an even bigger waste of space than the Comma Fairy's commas. They get in the way of the story, and do you really need an extra reminder that somebody is (a) a married female; (b) a female of undetermined marital status; (c) an unmarried female; or (d) just plain male? But they're inserted by another impish and elusive creature, a distant cousin of the Comma Fairy, called the Mr Shite.
Brightspark is an Irish Internet consultancy that jumped on the blogging bandwagon just under three months ago. It has a blog about what it does, with occasional forays into how it does it. One entry last August entitled "The nuns were right!" explains hwo the convent education has rubbed off: "The amount of times in the past few weeks alone that I've simply bumped into people that I need to engage for business. How glad I've been that I'm not in a tracksuit."
The writer also talks about the Irish weather and skangers, fresh flowers in the office, networking skills, coming up with a decent business name, choosing an ISP, appeals they've made for people to take part in focus-group sesssions (and how they got on afterwards), and other start-up concerns.
But back to those nuns. "Dublin is a small city, and my advice to any aspiring entrepreneur is to remember that and dress for success every morning. The nuns were right. You are carrying a reputation on your back. And Brightspark is a definitely a well cut trousers, high heeled sandals, shimmery blouse kind of company. If you want to work with an egg-stained T-shirt, polyester tracksuit kind of firm, please log out." So there.
I'm quite a messy person in other respects. Untidy desk, squiffy haircut, I shave badly, I'm not exactly sartorial elegance personified, and the autumn garden is a right mess at the moment too. But there's one area where I can't stand mess: my computer's desktop.
Apart from my BBC Model B and my old Amigas, I've always had to share "my" computers with someone else, whether it be work colleagues or her nibs. And it takes them less than five minutes on "my" machine for its desktop to be littered with their work / junk / "Untitled Folders". These fiends might never return to the machine, or there's a six-month absence from it, but their work will live on - their work, junk and "Untitled Folders" will loiter around on "my" desktop for another six months.
With workplace networks, especially when I'm being shunted from machine to machine, I'd try to keep all "my" stuff on the server rather than the individual machine. And I love network set-ups where you log on as you, and your particular desktop of stuff is loaded up.
I allow myself one indulgence on my laptop's desktop. I've one alias (that's the Mac equivalent of the PC's shortcut) on it that points to a folder tucked away the hard drive. Inside the folder are five aliases, each pointing to a subfolder that I access a lot. That way, I keep my neat file structure, but those frequently used subfolders are always just two easy clicks away.
And don't get me on about email folders. I don't understand people who don't have a decent folder system for their email either: just something along the lines of Inbox (25931), Deleted Items (2421) and Outbox (1).
Just spent several enjoyable train journeys between Dublin and Athlone with Tom Humphreys. No, not actually with Tom in person, but wrapped up in his recent book, "Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo".
Highly recommended. It's a rattling yarn about sport and sports writing, it's witty, frank, insightful, no-nonsense, lots-of-nonsense, serious, fun. Basically it revolves around how Tom spent the past calendar year as a sports hack.
Now Tom is a national treasure, up there with the Paddy Downeys and Con Houlihans of the planet, but one thing really kept doing my head in as I read the book: the amount of misspellings and other mistakes.
Call me an old-fashioned fuddy duddy or a fussy sub, but books aren't like newspapers or blogs or personal emails. Books have deadlines stretching over months or even years. Books are supposed to have a much longer shelf-life than your individual newspaper article. So you'd expect the publishers to spend time getting it right.
Tom isn't to blame for all this. His raw copy can be a bit, well, ropy and need a lot of cleaning and polishing. I subbed his raw copy a few times in the Irish Times, and it would need lots of banging away on the INSERT and DELETE keys to tidy it up. Mind you, Maeve Binchy's copy was worse again. She may be a best-selling novelist and a great storyteller, but her weekly column for the paper was very mucky when it arrived on your desk/screen. Frank McDonald, on the other hand, was an angel: meticulous, hardly a spelling mistake, rarely a comma or apostrophe in the wrong place - just pour it onto the page and know that your subbing work was nearly done.
Mucky copy goes with the terrain and the type of writer, and who cares if some of the very best reporters have mucky copy? Many editors would sell their grannies to have a Tom Humphreys or a Maeve Binchy in your roster of contributors.
Tom has to work to tight deadlines, under the cosh. If you're Malachy Logan, Tom's boss in the sports department, you're not going to give a fiddler's about the state of his copy - it's all about getting the story, getting it out on time, and telling it well - that's all that matters, and Tom does that brilliantly.
No, I don't blame Tom. I blame the book's publishers. Publishers have reaped the benefits of DTP: it makes doing different drafts and edits and rewrites much easier, faster and cheaper compared with the age of hot metal and the specialised typesetters of yesteryear.
All those benefits, yet many publishers have also become sloppy. They've removed most of the printers and typesetters from the process, then pushed much of that production work back onto the author/journalist. They expect writers to do far more work for them ("Yes, we need the final draft in Word, on a Zip drive"), and then they skimp at the other end, the proofing stage. They allow grammar/spelling mistakes into The Product that even something as artificially unintelligent as MS Word can pinpoint.
Take a book the length of Tom's opus, roughly 90,000 words. In the old days of hot metal, it'd take the better part of a week for a good typesetter (up to, say, 50 words a minute, with breaks) to input. You'd also have to add on several days before and after, to "mark up" the copy for the typesetters first, and to proof what they had typed afterwards, checking for any errors that may have crept in.
So by submitting the draft electronically, authors such as Tom save the publishers at least a person-week's labour, possibly more. But then the publishers don't even pass on any of these savings and benefits to the proofing stage - or to us readers. The fckuing eejtis.
(OR: Yep, I'm Finally Just About Back From The Belly Of The Midlands, Let's Get On With The Show Again)
So you've been asked to write a story for a newspaper, a one-off perhaps, and you're wondering how you should submit it. What kind of file do they want? Do you do it in MS Word with the appropriate words in bold and italics? What font do you use - Arial or Times? Do you send it on a floppy or by email?
Every publication is different, so I'll be as general as possible, but here are a few general rules and guidelines for filing copy to a newspaper or magazine. Many publications never explicitly state all these rules to their contributors, though they'd be saving everybody a lot of time, trouble and confusion if they did.
1. An attachment, a floppy, printed out, or put into the body an email message?
I'm just guessing here, but I'd say 99.99999% of all modern publications prefer it in an electronic format to a printed one. Saves on retyping.
And most publications prefer the email route rather than floppies. Floppies are more fiddly, they tend to get lost, and floppy drives to read them are scarce in Mac-based systems nowadays.
So email it is. Always check whether the publication accepts email attachments. Some publications don't, for technical/security reasons. In that case you will probably need to copy and paste your story into the body of an email message.
The production people will generally prefer your story with no formatting. That means no bold or italic, no fancy fonts, in fact no "fonts" at all, just as PURE TEXT. The story is going to be reformatted into the publication's own fonts anyway, and the subeditors will probably be stripping away the information about what is bold and italic. They just want the pure, unadorned words from you, in nice neat paragraphs.
So if they do accept email attachments, send the attachment as a ".txt" file, not as a ".doc" or an ".rtf" or ".cwk". When saving a final version before sending it, choose the TEXT ONLY option in MS Word, Apple Works or whatever other word processor you happen to be using.
[Or - a brief aside - you could always be a little more hardcore. I write mostly for the Web and print publications, and I never use Word. I always use a text-only editor: something like Editpad (or even Textpad or Notepad or whatever it's called) on a PC, or BBEdit (or even Textedit or Simpletext) on a Mac. These strip away all the extra features on Word that you won't be needing, and the result will always be pure text files. And some of them have other excellent features, such as BBEdit's multiple search and find-and-replace across entire folders. I've long been a fan of BBEdit, and it even sort of works on OSX. Many of these editors are shareware or freeware too, rant over.]
If you still need to stress a word or phrase, either rework it so that it's emphasised without the need for italics, or give the subeditors a clear indication in your copy of where the italics start and finish. Example:
"I wouldn't [ITALICS]dream[/ITALICS] of doing that," he said.
2: Filenames
If sending an email attachment, give it a sensible filename that will make the story easier to identify later on. Think of it from the production person's point of view: "shiatsu_feature" rather than "my latest feature for the Irish Times".
Whether you are filing a picture to the picture desk or a text file to the features department, always always always make sure it has a legitimate filename. Stick to letters and/or numerals ("abcdefg", "ABCDEFG", "12345"), ordinary dashes ("-") or underscores ("_"). Never use other characters (eg "@", "£", "$", "%", ";") because they could make your file unreadable at the other end, and can even confuse or crash some content management systems. One news editor I know was recently flummoxed by a file that nothing would Not even the old reliables (pure text editors). Eventually he renamed the file, getting rid of the illegal characters, and only then was it OK...
3: Paragraphs and indents
If you are copying and pasting into an email message, try to make sure WORD WRAP is off. Otherwise there
will be loads of extra
carriage
returns (not just at the end of each
paragraph,
but at the end of each line on
screen).
It's a pain, and some subeditors have tricks for removing stray carriage returns (in BBEdit you can select the "proper" paragraph, and do a find-and-replace of stray carriage returns by substituting a space " " for a "\r". And in Editpad you can do the same for "\r" and "\n"). But it's still a right pain.
In the story proper, do one carriage return after each paragraph. Not two or three. I know, I know, a double return makes it easier to read as you're writing, but turn these into single returns just before you submit the piece.
Do not insert tabs or blank spaces or any other forms of indent at the beginning of a new paragraph. In general, Quark/Indesign will insert the correct indent at the beginning of a new paragraph, so your extra spaces could mean a whopping big bit of extra space after this correct indent.
And I'd generally advise against using more than one blank space after a full stop. (In fact, when I've finished writing a story I'd generally do a search-and-replace, turning all double spaces into single ones.)
4: The start of the story
Put your byline at the beginning of the story. Even if it's a short piece and the final version is unlikely to use a byline, it will be handy for identification purposes as your story travels through the production process.
If you need to add a general note to the production people about your article, make it clear that it's a note, eg
NOTE TO SUB: spelling of Cronje in paragraph 4 is correct!!!
Or when it's within the copy
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said he would not be attending this morning's (NOTE TO SUB: FRIDAY) meeting
If the publication's style is to cap the first word in each story, you might want to cap yours. But if you are filing a series of briefs, don't cap each headline if it's going to end up as upper and lower case (ulc) anyway. In Quark and Indesign, subeditors are much more likely to know the shortcut to turn lower-case text into all caps than one to turn caps into ulc or into all lower case.
Newbie journalists often ask if they should supply a headline with their article. It's not essential, but no harm either - especially if you think you've a good one. It could also provide a jumping off point for the sub to top it with a better one.
5: Quotation marks
I know I keep stressing how people do quotes, it's just that they keep doing them wrong.
Check the publication's style on quotation marks. Generally newspaper style is to use standard double quotes at the start and end of the quoted section (the same " key near the RETURN key that you'd use for an abbreviation of an inch).
At the start/end of a quote, there is never a space between the quotation mark and the sentence or phrase it contains. Examples:
RIGHT: "This was a bit awkward," he said.
WRONG: " This was a bit awkward, " he said.
Only use single quotes for quotes within quotes. Examples:
"I then went to the Taoiseach, and he said: 'Not on your nelly, Micko,' so I left the room."
"Maire said the renovation of the bar had been 'a difficult and time consuming task'."
Put all full stops, commas and other punctuation marks inside the quotes if it is a complete quoted sentence. Example:
"I am never going to play for Ireland again," Keane said.
Otherwise the punctuation comes outside.
Keane says he is "never going to play for Ireland again".
6: Other things to watch out for
Euro symbols can get lost or mangled as text is imported from a word processing document into Quark/Indesign. It's a fonts thing, and the imported text on the designer's screen might show a blank space instead of a euro sign. Probably safer, then, to write "E1,000" rather than "€1,200".
Accents can be seriously messed up too. But you also need to know the publication's house style on accents. For example, here's a simple rule I came up with for one Irish paper:
include all fadas in Irish first names and surnames
include accents on French words (but not anglicised French words such as cafe, creche)
there's one exception to this: include them in words to avoid confusion - exposé, to avoid confusion with expose etc.
do not use accents on any other languages.
Irish-language words that are in common usage in English do not take accents (Garda, RTE, tanaiste)
So how do you do accents in your copy? Rather than typing the accent, it might be better to put a clear note to the sub:
Ciaran Mac Flatharta scored the second goal (NOTE TO SUB: FADA ON SECOND A IN CIARAN)
7: Its vs It's
Apostrophes are often catastrophes in copy. Too many journalists don't know the difference between "its" and "it's", tending to type the latter when they mean the former. A rule of thumb: if you are unsure, do a find-and-replace, turning each mention of "it's" into "it is". If it doesn't make sense it's because you really mean "its".
8: And finally...
Always spellcheck it before snednig. Sorry, before sending.
If you're becoming a frequent contributor, ask for a copy of the publication's style guide. Read it. Follow it.
Many of these guidelines and rules are about making the subeditors' lives a little easier, reducing the basic mess they get bogged down in and have to clean up before really getting down to business. Subeditors aren't your enemy - they are there to help. Get it right, and you will be giving them more time to make the best possible use of your story. Remember: word will probably get around the office if you keep submitting copy in rag order, with bizarre punctuation and stray carriage returns. What kind of message are you sending out to the first person trying to read your copy if you couldn't be arsed to spellcheck it and it's in an unreadable format?
Often, too, the first person to read and maybe even sub your copy is also going to be your commissioning editor. All the more reason to follow the basics, keep the sub/commissioner happy - and you might even get a few more articles out of them too.
