At work this week I've been training to learn a new task - producing dynamic digital editions. This is a process that Janice has pioneered for the company over the past couple of years, and it has grown to the point where more people on our team need to know how to do it as the need for it expands.
So far McClatchy is using these in about a dozen of its products, but we'll gradually be adding more until all of the products are using it (I think?). I don't understand all the details yet, but I'm learning.
I've enjoyed learning this because it's about the closest I'll probably be able to get anymore to doing anything remotely related to page design (which I enjoy), and it's a new software system to learn (PageSuite), and I enjoy doing that, too.
The biggest downside to working dynamic edition shifts is the late hours; I've been on 4pm to midnight for the training, and the regularly scheduled shifts can be until as late as 2am (in my time zone).
I used to work until midnight quite regularly back in the old days of the Bee copy desk, but with all the evolution of our work processes, it has been years since the last time I worked any later than about 9:30pm. So working until midnight has been an adjustment - it's an entirely different lifestyle being on swing shift versus day shift.
I never minded being on swing shift before, but it's the switching back and forth between the day/swing shift that can become a grind. We'll just have to wait and see how it goes.
Anyway, here's a thumbnail of one of the digital editions I worked on last night. These dynamic editions are made to resemble regular newspaper pages, but the biggest difference is that the stories don't have to fit the space. The stories usually are longer than the space, and when a reader is looking at these (as I understand it), they just click on the story and it opens the full story in another window. When they're done reading that, they close the story window and return to the dynamic page (or pages) to continue reading.
This is McClatchy's strategy to give newsrooms a chance to push out fresher news (they can select up to 20 of their top stories per day, but most use fewer than that) to their readers with later deadlines than the print editions have. Janice could explain all of this much better than I can. I think of the dynamic editions as kind of a hybrid between the print product and the newsroom's website. So yes, readers can still just go directly to the website for the latest news, but the dynamic edition sort of connects the latest news to the product's daily e-edition.
As you can see, we don't have to follow the same character-count standards here for headlines that we use for the print editions. And because these pages are 100% templated (we have zero ability to adjust the size of the articles), if a story is too short to fill the space, the only tools we have left to force the story to sort of fit are to make the headline extra long (we can also add deck heds, but I didn't try doing that yesterday) or else manually recrop the photos to be more vertical in the hope that those actions will push the text down far enough to fill the hole on the page.
The current software functionality is pretty limited, but I hear that we're expecting to get a software upgrade of some sort next year that might give us more tools/control.
