Here I am at my work PC. Just a little bit ago I was helping somebody type an email. The email was rather lengthly and complicated. However, I was able to just cranked it on out in short order. I could tell that the person that watched me do it was a bit amazed. I told her that my “crank it” ability goes back to being a college newspaper editor. ”
You’re kidding,” she said. “What college was it?”
I told her, then I went and talked to the other journalism major on the floor to talk about how the background working a newspaper helped in day to day business.
You might recall this person. It was James the Gatorade fanatic.
I asked James if his journalism major is used much in his day to day job.
“Only about a thousand times,” he stated. I almost told such hyperbole was not very journalistic, but we had converted him to marketing, so this pact with the darkside had corrupted some of his training. Why try and reverse it?
In reality, the college newspaper taught me that cranking out on a deadline was critical. To crank out copy, you simply need to “let go and out of control” to get the copy going. Afterwards, you go back and edit it. However, you can’t edit nothing. So rule #1 is get something on the page.
This leads to another not quite related story.
I asked James if he did paste up, which was the process of getting nice print out of the copy shop, then waxing and cutting these pieces of paper to put onto a master sheet. These sheets would be used to create the masters for the paper. Now a days, all of this is done electronically in desktop publishing, but in our day it was all manual.
I recalled a story from these years. I was responsible for the Opinion Section of the college newspaper. I remember on one occasion, I had gone out and asked a friend to write me something on the intersection of the catholic and protestant faiths. He kept pushing this out, and my friend simply wasn’t getting me copy. By the time that I finally got something from him almost at deadline. I took the copy down to the printshop, where we would layout the paper. I had it set, and when I got out the copy, it was very short to the space. So, I had some short copy, and a big blank page to fill.
Not knowing what to do, I grabbed a ball-point pen off the table. I looked at the story then I marked out a black box in the middle of the page. I then took the pen and quickly did an abstract drawing of a cardinal in hat. It was abstract and in my mind it looked scratched out. I didn’t put my name on it, because I was just hoping people would read the copy.
We ran the newspaper, and the drawing came out a bit better in black and white. I remember somebody saying how they really like the abstract drawing for the Op-Ed piece.
“Strange, ” they said. “I was wondering why it wasn’t signed.”
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