Front page stuff

The Skyline College semester is drawing to a close, and The Skyline View just put out its final issue of the semester last week. That is my preface to today’s post.

Sometimes news issues crop up at the last moment. In fact, that is the very nature of most news. Professional news outlets are always ready to deal with breaking news because they have the resources, the talent and the experience to do so. Bi-weekly publications such as The Skyline View are not as accustomed to breaking news situations and thus sometimes have trouble with breaking news coverage.

But The Skyline View’s most recent issue illustrates a successful sort-of-last-minute change. Two days before production, everything was going pretty smoothly for the opinions section (which I am the editor of). I had my pieces all squared away and all had agreed the editorial would be about the new Stop Online Piracy Act. But then the newsroom got a call from the SF City College paper, The Guardian, about a new organization called the Student Success Task Force.

Without getting into too much detail, the writers at The Guardian felt that the task force posed a threat to California community colleges and had an idea for a front-page editorial challenging the task force and some of its recommendations.

Many at The Skyline View were of the same opinion and felt that the issue could warrant a front page editorial. Thankfully, my classmate Nina was kind enough to take all the information on the new task force and write a pretty powerful editorial piece.

While I didn’t disagree with my colleagues on the issue itself, I will admit that I did have reservations about running a front-page editorial. I realized though, that since the editorial is technically under my purview, I might have a chance to do layout for the front page. And with the news editor’s permission that’s what I did.

Layout is probably the aspect of actual newspaper production that I find most interesting. I am curious as to what sort of design makes a newspaper look professional. And for the Skyline View’s latest issue, I made a few adjustments in an attempt to give the paper a cleaner more professional looking design. This is, of course, only my own opinion and the tweaks I made could still use some refinement, but overall I am proud of the stylistic changes I made to the front page.