Fellow newspaper slaves, please give me your sympathy on this cold, Alberta day. I have just finished production on a 28 page newspaper AND an 8-page special section that is about 95% advertising. All. By. Myself.
Yes, that's right. I made the dummy and the template pages TWICE because SOMEONE changed their mind, managed to appease the customer from HELL, designed every ad that you'll find in those 36 pages, compiled the classifieds, made the PDFs of the pages and uploaded them to the press -- and I did it all in three and a half days. Oh, and did I mention that at this particular newspaper, I also have to email or fax all the proofs myself and keep track of the corrections? And answer the phone and watch the front desk when the receptionist is busy on Monday and Tuesday and when we don't have a receptionist on Wednesdays? And answer all the emails in our general inquiry account? And on and on and on…
I worked until midnight on Sunday & Monday, and until 2 a.m. on Tuesday, but by God I got it done!
Looks like pages are done uploading. Better go home and eat something.
Only 67 days until baby gets here and my NEW stressful, round the clock job begins…
2 comments:
This post is the reason I won't work for newspapers anymore. Especially small town newspapers.
You must really love your job. Good for you.
I can sympathize. Up here I used to do 36 pagers regularly, but I didn't have to do the ad content. We were lucky enough to have several small sections working independently to achieve the one goal - preferably before 5:00.
Supplements are another story... Every year we'd do a business to business feature that usually ran about 104+ pages and took so much extra time. We'd do this as well as grad features, mining features and a small poni-tab feature for a local festival. I loathed feature season...
You have my sympathy completely!
Tracy
Post a Comment