Apostrophe S

I realized right before I say down to write this that I was planning on cataloguing my day much as I would keep track what I’ve done at work in a given day. Almost like accounting for myself to my boss. I realized that would be excrutiatingly boring. I mean, what do you care that I had popcorn fish sticks for dinner? I’m sure you don’t. So that means a rant is necessary… But about what?

Damn, saw my Cubs lost tonight. That’s always a bummer. But that’s not really a rant…

OK, so at the Daily News our proofing process is fairly simple. A black and white proof is made of every page. That proof is looked at by a few people, they mark corrections, the corrections are made and the Quark file is put into a folder, where an editor opens it, creates a PDF, and sends it to Richmond, where it’s printed on newsprint. Not so simple where I’m interning now. First, I make a proof for myself on the color plotter. I check to make sure everything looks all right. Usually this ends up being more like 4 or 5 copies before I get one that I’m ready to hand over to an editor, which is the next step. The editor looks at the page, marks corrections, and sends it back to me. I make the changes, and make another proof to give the editor. She usually has another set of corrections, then she sends it back to me. Then Harris comes along and convinces me that I should overhual my design and I repeat the above steps all over again. Then, once the page is done and approved by everybody, I have to split it into two files, because there are two editions with different page numbers. After I make the page number changes, I have to make proofs of both and run those by the editor again. If they’re OK, she tells me to go ahead and send them. Now, I’ve done the pages in Quark. At this paper, Quark is just a front end system. The backend system is this pagination software called Harris (just a coincidence it has the same name as my boss). Some of my pages can be sent straight from Quark. It involves a wacky file naming scheme, which I screw up a lot, and sending the page to a facility in another boro, who sends electronic proofs back which I check on a screen on the other side of the newsroom. I have to check all the separations and stuff like that. For those pages that I can’t send directly from Quark, I have to make an EPS of. Then I have to load that EPS into the content server, at which point I have to go to a PC terminal (Harris is PC only) and place the EPS onto a new page created in Harris. Then that goes off to the other facility just as the Quark files do, and I have to repeat the above described steps.

EDIT: The above described process is only for the weekly tab I do. The process for regular broadsheet pages is a little different. Sorry for any confusion.

Not that you care. Actually, you may have just skipped to this paragraph. I can’t say that I blame you. I did watch 3 consecutive episodes of Law & Order after work tonight. TNT has it down. They start playing the intro to the next episode while the credits from the previous episode are squished at the bottom of the screen. Michelle described a phenomenon to me that I didn’t believe was a problem until I experienced it myself. There is usually a commercial break right before the final trial scene in every episode. Then there isn’t another commercial until after the opening scene in the next episode. So there’s about 15 minutes where you can’t get off the couch, lest you miss anything. This is challenging when you have a particularly curious dog running around the house trying to keep you on your toes. I now know why this is a phenomenon that is worth noting. Not that I’d want them to do it any other way. Three episodes is awesome. I’m totally hooked on Law & Order, as I might have told you before. This Sunday they’re going to have a marathon on TNT, including a Law & Order movie. I can’t wait.

Again, stay tuned for another thrilling episode. Tomorrow I may have a surprise for you, my Constant Readers. Take care…

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