As we enter Year 79 of publication, we’ve a few surprises in store for our readers. The most obvious is that we are printing in color. Four of our pages – front, back and two in the center. A secondary benefit is that we can use more color in our online version. In fact, the online version will have every page in color, showcasing the many beautiful photos we receive from contributors. It’s an experiment so let us know if you like it. Check it out!
As a result of many months of behind the scenes work, we’re also proud to announce the debut of our new GreenbeltNewsReview.com website. It is the foundation for more online services – built to be expandable as we expand our online presence. We thank the Greenbelt Community Foundation for the generous grant that helped us do this.
The year has also been successfully financially. We’re delighted that the News Review continues to attract traditional and new advertisers, with five of our six most successful advertising months ever occurring in 2015. Kudos to the ad desk – Jessi Britton, Sylvia Lewis, JoEllen Sarff, Marylee Platt and Joanne Tucker . Advertising revenues tie directly to the size of the paper and as a result of strong advertising sales, the majority of papers this year have been 16 pages (with a few hearty 20-pagers and one 28-page behemoth). This gives us more room to tell Greenbelt’s stories and run its photographs. In prior years the paper has oscillated between eight and 12 pages and in darker times, didn’t get to four without help from our printer.
Behind the scenes there have been dramatic changes for the most part invisible to our gentle readers but which have put our hard-bitten newspaper people through the wringer more than once. And there’s more change planned for next year.
Preprint
One critical change provided us more layout latitude and flexibility as well as cutting costs. We brought the preprint process – which arranges text and photographs into the page layout – in house. Our team of Anne Gardner, Amy Hansen and Melinda Brady brought their energy and skills to the paper. All three were InDesign newbies at the outset and sweated bullets to climb its tough learning curve. They have succeeded in creating a paper that is consistently professional in appearance and organization.
Email
During the year the News Review went from one to four email addresses. Our domain name – that’s the @Greenbeltnewsreview.com element – is now preceded by one of four individual addresses: Ads, Editor, Office and Business. Details on these addresses are on Page 2 of every issue and on our website. Now we can elect to change email providers while keeping our addresses unchanged, eliminating this source of disruption in the future. We also changed our internal email client to a more modern interface. Board Members Diane Oberg and Tom Jones were instrumental in this and many other changes.
Quality Output
Our editorial process is increasingly focused on producing high-quality material that reduces the necessity for changes during the critical last phases before publication where minor changes on Page 1 can cause big trouble on Page 6. Editor Mary Lou Williamson’s evening crew and Senior Editor Judy Bell’s afternoon team strive valiantly to beat every comma into submission before passing a story to layout. Woe the gerund without its possessive.
Before the computer era, type was set by a typesetter who copied the final draft, putting individual metal characters into place in a tray. Proofers traditionally looked for errors introduced during this painstaking process. Now we use computers to generate camera ready pages so we’re better served by concentrating on quality during the editorial phase – when errors are easier to fix. Proofreading remains a crucial phase but has a different focus. Our new proofing process, overseen by Sue Krofchik (also the doyenne of Police Blotter) concentrates on structural problems in the laid out paper – like matching photos and captions, jumps to other pages and overall continuity and completeness. A high priority is to make sure all the right ads get into the paper correctly. Errors still creep in because, alas, Murphy has a thing about newsrooms.
Instead of keeping staff until nearly midnight every Wednesday, even our bigger papers are usually submitted to the printer by 7:30 p.m. We have thus cut hours off the production cycle with barely a quiver in quality.
Visual Appeal
GNR is planning to continue expansion of its photographic content and quality. We’re working to add more photos of our neighbors – teams, festivals plays, kids, cars, artwork, gardens and homes from every area of the city. Community photographers provide many professional-quality images, plus some that tell a story but are difficult to use because they are low resolution or badly lit. Photo Editor Nell Sydavar prepares them for publication – cropping and enhancing so that even unpromising submissions acquire a little charm.
We print more photos than ever before, but lack the space to print many others that deserve to be seen. Up to now, we have converted photos to black and white for printing. No more. As well as printing as many pictures as we can in color, we’re adding a photo gallery to our website, developed and curated by Outstanding Citizen and photographer Eric Zhang. This week’s website is merely the taste of things to come – we anticipate the gallery developing into a unique visual history of Greenbelt over time.
Website Design
The new website has a relatively austere appearance but its expandable framework uses a modern WordPress platform – offering a wealth possibilities for downstream expansion and enhancement. The site has no advertising banners to distract the user. It is a 100% organic and recyclable News Review. It was made so that we, a technologically challenged and mostly volunteer organization, can maintain it easily without subtracting precious effort from our primary focus of printing a weekly newspaper.
The new site retains our locally-famous online calendar of events, which debuted a year ago. This popular resource is maintained by Tom Jones – also its developer – and is yet more evidence of the beneficial effects of a Greenbelt Community Fund grant.
The new website’s primary purpose is to address GNR’s business needs and deliver the paper online more effectively. Priorities include addressing advertising, stories and pictures while administering effective two-way communication with advertisers and readers. A secondary aim is to provide additional services to the community: though – of course, the entire News Review is itself a service to the community, a play within a play? The photo gallery and the calendar fall into this service category – and we look forward to adding other useful capabilities. We’re especially delighted to receive concrete suggestions by people with the skills and time to implement them.
Home Grown
Greenbelt has everything you need and even things you didn’t know you needed. As an illustration, our new website was developed by Diamante Designs – which responded to our request for proposals earlier this year among a field that included submissions from as far afield as India and Estonia.
Locally owned, Diamante had a clear advantage based on their knowledge of the community and the paper. They have collaborated with us graciously and been helpful with suggestions and wise counsel. Diamante’s principals, cousins Tanya Amaya and Bethany Gresser, have their office in MakerSpace at Roosevelt Center – and are co-granddaughters of Greenbelter Eve Gresser, who was a volunteer editor at the paper. Small world.
Tomorrow
Although our technology has come a long way in the last couple of years, there’s still much to accomplish. Specific targets under consideration include an improved ability to receive submissions of all sorts on line and to provide quality control and validation at the point of submission. This will help us specify critical dates for publication and help keep stories, pictures and captions together – currently they’re like stray cats. We are also considering increasing the ability of our advertisers to submit, manage and pay for their advertising on line. We remain focused on continuing to improve our copy-editing standards and on elevating overall quality.
It turns out that running a paper is not for the faint of heart. Keeping up with technology is no walk in the park either. The Greenbelt News Review is evolving to meet the challenges and we suggest that rumors of the death of print may have been exaggerated. We remain the little newspaper that could.
Don’t forget to check out our new website – GreenbeltNewsReview.com.