Working nights

For the next two weeks, I will be working nights and flipping between the copy desk and the design desk as needed.

I started my run on nights last night. For the most part, I just shadowed people all night. My shift began at 4:00 and I shadowed Monte at the copy desk for a while. I found out that the copy desk is VERY thourough when they are editing stories. If the name of a place sounds a little off, for example, they will check to see how they have worded it in the past by checking the archives.

After shadowing Monte and learning how to edit a story "The Times way," I shadowed Diane at the design desk. The Times makes it so easy to design a page. They use style sheets, so they never have to worry about changing fonts or whether or not body copy is the right size, etc. Diane uses all quick keys, too, so she can design a page really fast. She ended up designing eight in all last night.

Once the designers have finished their pages, the copy desk takes one last look at the page before it is sent to the printing press. In all, all content in the paper gets three reads before it receives the official go-ahead to be printed.

The most interesting thing I learned about last night is how the paper is printed so quickly. The business and featuers desks have an earlier deadline than news and sports. Business needs to have all of their pages done and edited by 4 p.m. every night. Features comes next with a 5 p.m. deadline. While those two sections are printing, news and sports are working on proofing and designing. Sports has the latest deadline, since they are often waiting for late scores to come in. News, where I work, actually has four different deadlines throughout the night. The Times covers all of Northwest Indiana, and we split that into four regions: Porter County, Northern Lake County, Southern Lake County, and Eastern Illinois. Each region gets its own uniquely designed news section. Porter County deadline is at 10:00, North Lake County is at 10:30, South Lake County is at 11:30 and Illinois is at 12:40. My editors said that they normally don't take that long to get all of the pages done, as they are usually done around midnight. They were right, and I walked out of the times a little after midnight last night.

I'm not sure where I will be tonight or if I will be shared between the two sections. I will update tomorrow.