The way all newspapers could be produced ...

Here is the cover and my Newcastle United preview from the Irish Examiner's 40-page pre-season football supplement. It was published last Friday and includes a page on each club, predictions, betting, analysis and some great writing from the likes of Ben Lyttleton, Adrian Clarke and Iain Spragg. I produced it while sunning myself on the family summer holiday on the Med. I was aided by Paul Wick and Mike Brough who are based in Darlington. It was printed and published in Cork. We have done this for years. We receive a flatplan from the Examiner, they provide some of the material and we commission and write the rest. We then edit the copy, write the headlines, select the pictures, layout the pages, proof-read them and send them to Ireland. They email any changes, we carry them out and send them hi-res PDFs to put directly on their system. It works and it's cost effective. Three people producing a 40-page paper at a rate per page. In May the Full Time supplement we did in the same way was 56 pages. I have long advocated that this is how newspapers should be produced. Subs can work from anywhere - in their bedrooms or in the South of France (indeed, the Evening Herald in Dublin is produced entirely at Castres in the South of France). Subs don't all have to be in the same room, the same building, the same town or even the same country ... which is why all the fuss in regional newspapers about moving production sites from one city to another struck me as nonsense. In future I reckon all newspapers will be produced this way. Who needs complicated management systems? Bedroom subs armed with a computer, a set of stylesheets, the right fonts, broadband, a piece of software (doesn't matter if it's Quark or InDesign) and Distiller will be contracted to do so many pages per day to deadline. And where would you rather work ... in a pokey office in an industrial estate or in your own back garden or, perhaps, in the South of France.


      

Subbing hubs turning full circle?

Traditional subs? Hubs? Reporters writing directly to the page? Outsourcing? Working from home? In the last few months I have been working with newspapers who are all taking a different approach to how they produce their titles. At the Daily Mail I have been training subs in the usual way - text editing, accuracy, rewriting, headlines and layout. This week I have been with those at the Press Association who are producing the Daily and Sunday Mirrors and the People. With big-hitting former Mirror subs now on the PA team, it is a project that has settled down and is working smoothly. Indeed I have stolen a headline from sub Kay Harrison on Polly Hudson's column - Daybreak's Christine Bleakley: The secret diary of Adrian's moll - for my headline course. I have also been at the Hull Daily offices, not working on the hub, but training 80 reporters to write headlines. The conclusion, not surprisingly, is that bright reporters can be taught to create good publishable headlines. It is certainly right that editors examine the way their newspapers are produced. If I was editing these days I would definitely put my editorial energy into the content and look at ways to reduce the 'processing'. We all know, of course, that in many cases the motivation is not to shift manpower to the reporting side but to cut costs. There has been much written about this and there will be much more to come. Here is the latest contribution Why the hubs will turn full circle  from my old editor Allan Prosser in this month's InPublishing magazine. As usual Allan doesn't sit on the fence. Here is a couple of extracts: 

In the Gadarene rush to impose manufacturing process on their titles, publishers have destroyed value, thrown away knowledge, and vandalised their assets. In many cases they should be ashamed, not that shame is a common characteristic of the newspaper business. More importantly, very few managers who have overseen this damage would last a week in the real world of competitive industry.

No edition of this magazine would be large enough to accommodate the account of howlers, inaccuracies and plain stupidities which have emerged through the centralisation of production and the so-called focus on efficiency through delayering the checks and balances which existed before the move to what has infamously been called “one touch publishing.  

Strident stuff. Your thoughts, as always, are welcome.