The Newspaper Coup: Forcing innovation by going it solo.

Most of the people reading this blog are young - based on referrals and e-mail correspondence with the readership, I'd wager many of you are about to graduate from college. That means that you've hopefully got big ideas, and want to make it in the news industry as an innovator. You'll probably get frustrated at the lack of jobs available (due to recent cuts), but eventually find some small or medium sized paper who needs a web guy/gal.

Netflix is great. Watching Kojak Season 1 on instant viewing (which is also available on Hulu, but at a lesser quality - and with commercials).

There was a point to sharing that, but I'll get to it later.

Anyway, you make it in, and start learning the ropes. You get a few tasks, and you complete them. Mostly grunt work.

Two years later, and you find yourself in fewer meetings. You are still doing grunt work, but it's a little better grunt work that actually requires some thought. Still, you aren't getting many chances now to innovate, which is what you set out to do, right? The reason you aren't allowed in the meetings is because you rocked the boat just a bit too much, probably. You might have offended some of the older sales staff, or rubbed the editor the wrong way.

So, what do you do now? How do you show your employer that you really can do something good?

Simple. Just do it - whether they approve or not.

Easier said than done, of course - you are adopting a sort of gray-hat ethic not entirely unlike security experts who pen test companies without their knowledge. You could get yourself in deep ordure if you try to generate revenue from it initially.

Ooh, dirty cop just handed a junky a load of premium... Sorry, Kojak again.

Figured out the reference yet?

Success happens in ways that aren't always apparent. Netflix's rating system is constantly pushing for improvement - in fact, they've held a contest for people to develop a better recommendation algorithm, rather than relying on people in house.

That's amazing.

Hulu pushed the edges of media distribution by creating a legit way for people to freely view their favorite TV shows and classic movies - they saw a demand for change in the industry, and moved forward.

Both have managed to distract me a number of times, which means they have definitely succeeded.

It may be risky, but if you can create a proposal that includes the final product and demonstrates its effectiveness, you might just win them over. Granted, this assumes that the people who make decisions aren't so stubborn that they'll ignore success, or that their job isn't at risk by the change (I'm looking at you, sales reps - your days of skirt-play and faxed proposals set in Comic Sans MS are numbered).

Start small with something easily implemented in your free time that looks good enough to be worthwhile, and you'll probably find it a lot easier to start your new ideas in-house. Still, it'll take time - but you chose this field. Nobody said it'd be easy.

-WFL

On Tempted and Future Excess

Within the next 12 hours or so the rest of Tempted and Future Excess will go live. Final touches were made, listening tests on multiple auditory devices completed, and artwork was finished.

The EP/single/mind-numbing-multimovement-piece is more than just a rewrite-remastering, however. It is a reliving of history. Mental anguish replayed, live.


Social Engine's conception surrounds thought, interaction, and reaction. Nearly all instrumental works are to be interpreted as internal dialog. Tempted is no different.

Tempted's entire theme is internal struggle. The fight against what can basically be summarized as human nature; the inherit evil of us all. While the original Tempted dealt with a specific incarnation of personal evil, the re-write is more abstract in certain ways, even though it draws from my life at this current point in time. A life I'd rather not live, personally, but if I must, I will make as much use of it as possible.


The Future pieces (1 and 2) are conclusions to Tempted, based on broad choices made in the struggle against human nature. They are supposed to be in stark contrast to eachother - polar opposites. Whether to be interpreted as success or failure is left up to the listener, though casual music fans can and certainly should feel welcome to draw the obvious conclusion based on style, dynamics, and instrumentation.

One thing I decided to come into Tempted with, in this project, was the belief that a singular, finalized conclusion could never be written. My reasoning for that is because the original conception (based on my personal struggles) never will be resolved, nor will any one persons' (or even humanitys', as a whole).


Tempted isn't about completion. It isn't about understanding evil, sin, or whatever label you provide. It is about survival.


-WFL

Confessions of a Newspaper Graphic Designer Pt. Deux - "The Lingo"

If you want to become one of the elite - a design monkey for a newspaper (hah, yes, that's funny) - then you need to not only walk the walk, but talk the talk. This should give you an introduction to some of the terminology used in the newspaper world, as well as a few other misc. tips.

Term number one: "Dummy". The dummy is a printed reference for the advertising layout. Believe it or not, advertising comes first in the newspaper industry - It is part of what determines how many pages the paper will be, what parts of the paper will have color (if you have limited color availability), and more.

The second term we will introduce is "spreads" or "printer spreads". If you have ever looked at a newspaper, you'll notice that on a 12 page paper, pages one and twelve will be on one side of a big sheet, and 2 an 11 will be on the other side. These are the spreads. Not all pages can be on a full spread, however, which brings us to our next term; the "dink".

The dink is a half-spread (single page) that is stuck in the middle of the paper when necessary. For instance, if you have a 10 page paper, you would have 2 full spreads (printed on both sides), plus a dink in the middle.

Two more important terms are the gray bar and/or color bar. These are both used to calibrate the colors in the press during the printing process and help align the separate plates ("separations", which is basically the individual plates for each color - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black and any extra spot color plates). At my newspaper, we use a gray bar. The gray bar is printed along the bottom (or vertically in the middle, in the case of a tab layout) using a specific combination of all four inks, which should create a gray shade. You should be able to check the gray bar with a densitometer, which will tell you how dense the ink is on the page.

One final term I'll leave you with in this article is one you should learn, and avoid having to say or hear as much as possible - Four-color black.

Four-color black refers to a true black that is composed of all four CMYK plates. This black is the black you see on screen, but in the newspaper industry, you want to avoid using it at all costs (except in the case of photos). The reason four-color black is a problem is you usually encounter it with ads and content from amateur designers whom have little to no professional newspaper design experience - and in most cases, the body type for the materials will be set in a four color black, which is near impossible to align well enough to read easily. That's why we have a black plate, known as "Key" - so we don't have to align 3 RGB plates for 8 point type.

Stay tuned for more terminology from the newspaper industry.

-WFL