Having just about survived making the newspaper, enjoyed the last day of Greenbelt enormously, and spent the last couple of days recovering, I'm sat in the Brighton Dome waiting for the dConstruct fun to start, I thought it would be good to reflect on the newspaper experience. [Actually, it took me another week to get around to finishing this, but most of it was written over the dConstruct weekend.]
Firstly, we actually made it, got it to site and handed it out. That was the first critical thing, the proof that we could do it. Even better, people seemed to really like it. Really like it, actually. That's the second critical thing, the proof that it was worth doing.
The third thing, of course, was that in the possibility space of newspapers covering a three-day, very specific, slice of the internet (stuff relating to Greenbelt 2009 written over the course of the event) we only managed to occupy the slightly rubbish bit in the corner. For a first, utterly unprepared, attempt this is brilliant, since it leaves a thing which was wonderfully received space to become something far, far, better.
You can download the paper from the Greenbelt Blog article about it. James and I still have some copies of the real thing, so if you're desperate to see it, let me know.
Well, duh.
We had two distinct sets of problems here. The first was that we'd done no prep work, because we didn't think we'd got the money to do it. As I reported before, Hewlett Packard stepped in and forced our hand. We could have done a 4-page A4 (one folded sheet of A3) mono thing, but suddenly we had the money to go the whole hog.
Leaving aside the question of the design itself, our biggest single problem was securing content. We had originally thought that there had been some people who had agreed to write guest posts for the Greenbelt blog over the festival, but we hadn't chased any of that up. We had our wires crossed, so we had to scare up the writers. Since this was a prototype paper, we had planned to rely on stuff created by people close to Greenbelt-the-organisation, using the paper, post-festival, to engage the wider greenbelter community for next year's effort (assuming there was one).
The next biggest problem was our layout work rate. Because we only had one Mac with InDesign and the paper on it, only one person at a time could work stuff up into laid-out pages. Right at the end, as the deadline loomed, this meant we didn't have time to include either late-arriving content (we had some), or planned-but-unfinished content (we had some of that).
There were really only two of us working on this, and with chasing around for content we were overstretched editorially. We really needed another body to turn the raw material for some of our ideas into text or illustrations we could hand over for layout.
Everything takes time too, and more time than you think it will. Making the photo pages was a case in point. You had to make the grid of container boxes, fill them with images and then add the correct flickr URL to the key at the bottom. This was essentially cut-and-paste-template-page, followed by dropping in picked images and URLs. It was the easiest thing we did in the paper, but even this bit took around 20-30 minutes for one page. That's a lot time when deadline is approaching, and it doesn't include the time taken to do the picture editing work to pick out the pictures, and the time to generate and check the URLs (we were using short URLs which can only be obtained via an API call, or generated from a URL template and a base-conversion of the photo ID from base 10 to base 58).
The final element was the printing. We'd spoken with Newsquest Printing, but had had to cancel our print slot with them because we hadn't been able to get the money together. I emailed them on Thursday, after they'd closed for the day, and hoped they would get my message first thing Friday and that there would be a print slot available. Lisa Carmel and David Denham at Newsquest were brilliant and we were able to negotiate our way into a print slot late on Sunday night at their plant in Oxford. David Cheetham from Newsquest's Oxford pre-press team talked me through the submission process and checked over our test pages, which was really helpful.
I had originally planned to do a couple of days work on design prep for the paper, working up a grid, headline styles, text styles and various configurations of pages (different numbers of stories on a page, various size ad spaces, combinations thereof). I eventually spent all of Friday on this, followed by several hours tweaking over the weekend. I basically could have saved a work day during the festival, and produced a vastly better designed product, with good prep. We had a problem with equality of attribution, where stories got a byline and URL, but photos just got a URL, and a short URL at that. So, we managed to be unfair to the photographers by not mentioning their names anywhere. We could have avoided that with a solid design.
To avoid spending hours hunting for photos we used Flickr's interestingness as a measure, and because we were allowed we added Greenbelt's official non-CC licensed photos to the mix of Greenbelter-uploaded photos. The fact that Greenbelt's own photos were being uploaded regularly through the festival meant that they had a lot longer to register on the interesting scale than Greenbelters' own. In hindsight, I'm not surprised that we didn't use anyone other than Greenbelt's photos -- the effort required to dig out CC licensed ones from the mass of interesting official ones (there were half a dozen official photographers' work being uploaded to the Greenbelt account) was prohibitive given our available time. I'm not sure exactly what we could have done to prevent that (or even whether we'd want to), but I would have liked to have been able to chew it over.
We wanted to do some infographics around festival statistics (size of the site, number of people), and we only managed a silly (but very effective) site size comparison diagram. We really should have planned what we were doing in advance so that producing the charts was a matter of adding the live statistic to the right set, rather than getting a live statistic and trying to figure how to represent it and what to compare it with.
A much more detailed page plan than the one we had (which essentially said that there were 16 pages, with a photo to go on the centre spread) would have allowed us to filter, or commission, content which reflected the range of the festival's content. Our content was very words-focussed, and we didn't really cover any of the other aspects: no music, no visual arts, no performing arts, no comedy, no childrens or youth stuff, and nothing about site setup and build... I would have liked the paper to be much more representative of the whole arc of the festival.
We hadn't finalised any plans for any of the mundane practical things we needed to do once the paper had been printed, and we ended up finalising a plan to collect the papers after they'd gone to press. I drove a car to Oxford, shoved the papers in the boot, and drove straight back. We also hadn't really thought through how to distribute the papers on site once we had them. Last Orders came through for us and advertised it to their 1000+ plus audience on Sunday night, and James got the Venue Managers to agree to having papers in each of the talks, and some of the music, venues. Transport was a problem there too, and we ended up hiring a Greenbelt Taxi to drive us and 4,000 papers round site to the various venues on Monday morning.
I think we'd forgotten that there would be work in converting things from HTML to InDesign, and I'd certainly forgotten exactly how long it takes to lay things out, even with a solid grid and stylesheets. We ended up being bottlenecked by the fact that we only had one Mac on which we could do layout (i.e. one which had a large enough screen to work with any speed on).
Because we were only using photos with appropriate licenses from Flickr, I was able to script indesign so I could generate a Flickr short url from a picture in InDesign (as long as it was a Flickr photo whose filename hadn't been mangled). That saved important thinking time, and made attributing photos take 5 seconds instead of 5 minutes, and massively reduced the chance for error. All of these are important when you have 5 minutes before your print deadline.
I also cooked up a tiny Hpricot-using script to take HTML, make the URLs for links in it into plain text on the page, and spit the HTML back out, which saved hours of digging around in view source, and typing and retyping URLs (which is always error-prone at the best of times).
I'll stick these both up on Github when I've retrieved them from a backup.
The biggest practical triumph, and the biggest problem, we had was with the printing. The triumph was that the quality of the printing was superb. I last did newspaper stuff with the student newspaper at Reading University in the late '90s. The registration was often bad, and pictures often looked off-colour and, particularly when the registration was bad, muddy and horrid. Newsquest's printing was immaculate. The registration was perfect, the colour was great and the pictures looked amazing. I'm really, really, happy with that side of things. There was, however, a problem (and if you've seen it, you'll know about it).
The layout-to-printing-press part Newspaper printing these days is basically a human-free process. You upload some PDFs to a server, the system their puts them in order and makes plates from them. All the pre-press stuff happens before you start. We verified that we were making the right kind of PDFs on the Friday of Greenbelt. We sent files with images (always problematic) and text (fonts, always problematic), and everything was fine. So far, so good. However, if you've seen the final printed product you'll have noticed the enormous print problems on some of the pages. What happened was that we weren't told that if you leave white space at the edges of your PDFs, the computer system at the press will simply scale them so that there's no white space left. This would have been fine if we'd known about it. A simple line down one edge, or dots at the corners, would have solved it. Unfortunately our test pages had all had images to the very edges of the page, so this didn't show up when were dealing with the pre-press guys. The lesson: make sure your test pages are representative of your final output.
So, I think my top tips for doing this again:
First off, a big thanks to HP for sponsoring the paper. They've stumped up the cash to pay for the whole thing, which is really what made it possible.
A big thanks to James Governor for putting us in touch with HP.
Thanks to Ian Usher and Wilf Whitty for their help with things photographic, and to all Greenbelt's official photographers for allowing us access to their amazing stuff.
Thanks to Jenny Brown and the Media Capture team for providing us with the stills and descriptions from their videos
Thanks to Lisa, the Davids, Mark Wackrill, and the printers at Newsquest for pulling everything through at the last minute and providing us with such high-quality printing.
A big shout to James Stewart, my long-suffering co-conspirator, and many thanks to Clare for putting up with my vanishing/overwork act at the festvial.
Most importantly, thanks to all our contributors:
The possibilities for this little slice of post-digitalia are enormous so, if you're at Greenbelt next year, look out. We may well have something MOAR AWESOME up our sleeves.