At the Helm of Design

The layout process for each issue of Horizons consists of several stages in which the graphic design team creates a proof that is reviewed by the editor-in-chief, who marks it up and returns it for final revisions.

I’ve mentioned in a past post that this didn’t happen for the March edition; a timing error prevented us from reviewing the paper before sending it out. We crossed our fingers and let it go. We were lucky that there were no major oversights.

The April issue, however, was a different story. It was twice as long as the March edition.

Twice as many opportunities for mistakes.

We had learned from the previous debacle and given ourselves plenty of extra time. The editor-in-chief and I sat in with the graphic design student on a Friday afternoon, taking care of problems as they arose. I put a few pages together on my own to save time.

The graphic design student came in on his own that Saturday to finish. He sent the PDF the same afternoon, a full two days before our deadline. We had an ample chance to review the proof.

On Sunday, I gave the pages a once-over to see if there was anything egregious I could catch.

Indeed there was. The page numbers had not been set correctly – they were on the outside of one page, the inside of the next. One photograph had an incorrect cutline. Another photo had not been resized to fit within the frame.

These and other minor mistakes are not unusual for a proof. They add up, however, and can significantly detract from the readability of the paper.

After I marked up the PDF, I uploaded it to the folder in Google Drive we share with graphic design. I texted the student to let him know that it would be there for him when he came in Monday.

He texted me back to let me know he wasn’t at the college Monday.

I flew into contingency mode. The current editor-in-chief is not familiar enough with Adobe InDesign, the layout software, to make the changes on his own. Professor Karyn Smith had never used the program. I was the only person around with the required skill set.

I called Smith to let her know what had happened. I asked for her blessing to miss the Publications class so I could spend the time Monday on reworking the paper. She agreed it was the only viable solution.

Next I called the graphic design professor, Andy Pinto. He didn’t pick up his phone, so I left a message. I explained the dilemma and asked him to open the design room so I could access the InDesign files.

Finally, I texted editor-in-chief Dave Weidenfeller to give him an update and tell him my plan. He was on board.

I spent the next afternoon fiddling with borders, creating lines and frames, and rearranging text.  Pinto came by a few times and answered any questions I had. InDesign is a complex program, and it had been about a year since the last time I had used it. The experience was a little like trying to pick up bicycling after a long period on foot: you don’t forget how to peddle, but you ride more slowly for the first mile or so.

The last time I used InDesign was to create this newsletter in early 2012.

I ran into some rough terrain along the way. The graphic design student had linked the text boxes containing the headlines with the boxes containing the bodies of the articles. For a while, I couldn’t figure out why adjusting a margin would throw the whole article out of whack.

Eventually I ferreted out the problem. I could correct it by deleting the box for the headline, creating a new one, then cutting and pasting the text into the right places. It took more time, but it had to be done.

By about 4 p.m., I’d finished tweaking the paper. I sent it out to the printer and texted both Smith and Weidenfeller to let them know it was out for publication.

As Pinto and I closed up the design room, we talked about some of the close calls we’d had getting the paper laid out in the past. He remarked that we’ve been working together for years now.

I was surprised and flattered. Surprised because it hasn’t seemed like such a long time. Flattered because he phrased his remark as if I were his colleague.

Maybe someday I will be. It would be a joy to come up with contingency plans several times a semester.

Past Papers Provoke New Ideas

Part of the “Roving Reporter” segment by former staff member Margarita Brown from the March 2009 edition of Horizons.

Photo by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Mark Twain is often credited as having said that although history doesn't repeat itself, it does rhyme.

By the time the Publications class gets to the final edition of the newspaper, Pub I students are familiar with the process and Pub II students have begun to differentiate themselves as leaders or writers with a particular niche.

One pleasant part of being at this point in the semester is that the class's concentration can shift to some of the nuances of the journalistic trade. We don't have explain the basic structure of a story or how to share a document.

It's also nice because the students know the rules well enough that they can be challenged to stretch them or break them constructively. Journalism is at heart a creative enterprise, and that means being open to experimentation.

It was in that spirit that Professor Karyn Smith asked the students to bring in newspapers from all over the area to rifle through for ideas that could be incorporated into future editions of Horizons.

I just happen to own copies of every issue of Horizons from 2007 through 2011. In almost every issue, there is an example of someone's attempt to liven the paper.

One former student faithfully wrote questions for “man on the street” interviews during every issue. We called the segment “Roving Reporter.” The project was simple: just profile pictures and a quote from each respondent. But it was a great visual, and used the paper as a sounding board for students' opinions.

My predecessor as editor-in-chief used to write an op/ed column called “He Said/She Said” that featured a male and a female with dueling opinions about gender relations. The topics were often racy. Sex sells.

Other students created photo collages, or drew comics, or wrote an interview piece in a question/answer format instead of integrating the quotes into a straightforward news article.

A few days prior to the class, I took out my old collection of newspapers and went through them one-by-one, marking stories and pages I thought demonstrated some of the best examples of staff creativity.

I never got to see exactly what the students picked out of them. That day also happened to be the deadline for getting the April issue to the printer. After dropping my papers off to the class, I was holed up in the graphic design department, fixing some layout issues (an experience I'll relate in my next post).

I know the students definitely liked some of the ideas of their predecessors, though. In the following class, several volunteered to put together segments based on what they had seen. The “Roving Reporter” may return. Another student offered to create an events calendar. There may even be a summer “bucket list” - a new addition to the paper.

History does sometimes rhyme. In our class, the students found the flint edge with which to spark their creative thinking by pairing those past cadences with their present talents.

Audience Shapes Story Focus

One of the long-standing policies of the Publications class has been that, in order for a student to receive credit for their stories, at least one must have some angle pertaining to HCC.

The policy does not necessarily determine whether a story gets into the newspaper; that is a decision made by the editors. It does, however, influence the student’s grade.

We have tweaked this rule so to mean slightly different things over the years. When I first came to the paper, we were told we had to incorporate at least one source from HCC into the story. Students sometimes worked around the mandate by inserting a random quote from a student into a story that had nothing to do with them. You’d end up with something like this:

The Wildcat roller coaster at Lake Compounce was built in 1927, making it one of the world’s oldest operating coasters.

“I enjoy riding roller coasters,” said HCC student Adam Adamson.

The amusement park’s newest coaster, called “Boulder Dash,” was built with the natural terrain in mind…

The standard changed while I was editor-in-chief. The program’s advisor, Steve Mark, and I decided it would be clearer to students if we told them to incorporate an angle relevant to HCC.

An article might talk about Bridgeport’s Board of Education without using any source from inside HCC, but would show why the story would matter to HCC students (in this case, many of them come through the public school system).

When Professor Karyn Smith took the reins this semester, she changed the formula ever-so-slightly again. Previously we had only pushed students to cover one HCC-specific story. Now she wanted all students’ stories for grading purposes to lean that direction.

From a journalistic standpoint, her change made immense sense. The entire justification for Horizons’ existence is to serve the college community. It is, quite naturally, our turf. No one needs us to tell them what’s happening in Bridgeport’s government - the Connecticut Post is right up the street and already does that, as do half a dozen other papers in town.

We can’t compete with them for the city. But they can’t compete with us for the college.

Nevertheless, there was some pushback about the policy from students. Throughout the semester, several voiced frustration at the idea they would be limited to events inside the college.

That was never Smith’s point. The idea was to get students to consider their audience and incorporate that into all their stories.

We realized, though, that there was a gap in understanding, even as proposals for the third and final issue of the semester were getting underway.

Smith attempted to demonstrate the concept of audience in class. She asked the students to think about North Korea’s recent threats aimed at South Korea and the U.S.

“If you live in South Korea,” she told students, “the story is going to be about preparation – what you should do to be ready in case something happens.” Then she asked students what a story might focus on if it was written for residents of Austin, Texas - one of the sites marked on a North Korean map of bombing targets.

“Why Austin?” one student asked.

“Exactly,” replied Smith.

She next asked them to make the story appropriate for the HCC community.

People had numerous suggestions. If the North Koreans could hit Washington, D.C., they could hit Bridgeport. There were Korean international students. There were members of the military stationed there who had families in the area. Some students at the college had expressed fear and confusion about the situation. Others simply didn’t know what was going on.

At the end of this exercise, I pointed out that there was yet another way to approach the story: there are political science and history professors at HCC. They could offer insight.

A college campus should be one of the easiest places in the world to find expertise and context for a story. Yet students sometimes underappreciate this resource. They think of professors and other professionals at the college only in their roles as teachers and staff.

Some students still resisted restricting their audience to their classmates. A few said they thought they should be expanding to the broader community.

Smith countered that they would not have a hook for anyone outside the school unless they could reach the class next door.

I added that they could think more broadly about the college community: professors, alumni, members of the Housatonic Community College Foundation and others with ties to the college are also part of their core audience.

Finally, the students were asked to write down a few ideas and work the audience into their proposals. Some students were clearly inspired; one proposed a story revealing the different prices that nearby Dunkin’ Donuts stores charged, and how the establishments closest to the college were not necessarily the cheapest.

In the end, most of the proposals were strictly about campus affairs. When Smith and I talked about the discussion later, we could not decide whether it had actually introduced more creativity into the proposals.

Read the April 2013 Issue of Horizons

The April issue of Horizons is on news stands and online now! You can read it via Scribd below.

Long-time HCC Professor Leaves Powerful Legacy: Bob Isaacs (1929-2013)

Bob Isaacs circa 1975. Photo courtesy of the Housatonic Community College Archives. Used with permission.

The following article is a posthumous tribute to Robert M. Isaacs that I wrote for Horizons at the behest of the current editor-in-chief. Isaacs was the first faculty adviser for Housatonic Community College’s student-run newspaper. He also founded and developed the journalism program in which I studied and which I am now helping to teach. I personally feel a deep indebtedness for his contributions to college. The full memorial appears in the April issue of Horizons.

When the first issue of HCC’s student-run newspaper came out on Oct. 11, 1967, a noteworthy name appeared at the bottom of the paper’s staff list: “Robert M. Isaacs, Faculty Advisor.”

It was the beginning of an influential 44-year career at the college that ended only a few months before Bob, as his friends called him, died Feb. 21 at the age of 84.

Over the course of that career, Bob created Housatonic’s journalism program, helped launch the creative writing magazine, taught numerous courses on literature and writing, and inspired hundreds of students. He was an inveterate booster of the budding college and a vociferous defender of students’ rights.

Born Jan. 15, 1929 in the Bronx, Bob was passionate about reading and writing from early on.

“When I was a little kid – second or third grade – I remember writing lurid stories to amuse my friends,” told the Bridgeport Post in a 1997 article about his efforts to revive HCC’s lapsed creative writing course.

Bob’s wife, Karen, says that after high school he had his first foray into journalism working for the International News Service and the Daily Mirror in New York.

Bob left the news industry to earn a bachelor’s in English from the City College of New York and a master’s in American Literature from New York University. He was drafted in the Korean War, where he specialized in military intelligence while stationed in Frankfurt, Germany.

When Bob returned to the states, he attended Loyola University in Chicago. There, says Karen, he worked with a professor who was enamored with James Joyce. Bob adopted developed a love of Irish literature, earning his doctorate in the subject.

“Bob thought of Joyce and Yeats as the greatest writers of the modern age,” says Karen. “Joyce fascinated him. The work was a puzzle, intellectual, referential and full of alliterations.”

By 1964, Bob had moved to Stratford, where he owned the now-defunct Stratford News. The Stratford Board of Education was considering starting a community college. His paper championed the cause.

A few years later, he was teaching journalism at the new college while running his newspaper.

Teaching proved to be just as much of a passion for Bob. It was a chance for him to share his adoration of writing with others.

And share he did, sometimes with more people than intended.

“Bob was loud, in a good way,” says English Professor Emeritus Glenn Kindilien, who began teaching at HCC in 1971 and came to consider Bob as family. “We used to joke that our students should get double credit for his class as well as ours.”

Bob’s own students also noticed how excited he would get in the course of teaching.

“He would be sitting there reading to us, and he would get so excited. He’d be laughing hysterically,” says Director of Student Activities Linda Bayusik, who took classes with Bob in the 1990’s.

Indeed, drawing students into his world was one his aims. In a 1985 profile by the Bridgeport Post, he described his approach to teaching poetry as “like throwing a barrel of cold water on them (students)….Eventually, I have to say: ‘You ought to know I probably think this is the most important thing in the world.’”

From the start, Bob also sought to give his students a leg up. In 1968, he hired two of his journalism students, Lois Cronin and Dale Friedman, to work for him at the Stratford News. Cronin became Society Editor.

He continued throughout his tenure to help young journalists find employment. Bayusik says he recommended her for a job at the Connecticut Post, which she held for three years. She had been an editor for Horizons under him, where she learned such skills as editing, interviewing, layout structures – and how to use a computer.

Those skills still influence Bayusik’s writing today. She says people have commented that her emails are “quick and to the point.”

“I learned that doing journalism with Bob,” she explains.

One of the ways he effectively prepared students for the real world was by being a stern taskmaster.

Former Horizons Editor-in-Chief Joseph Weathered says Bob reminded him of a gruff, stern coach running a boot camp.

“You would write a lead, and he would say, ‘No, not good enough,’” Weathered recalls.

The ones who stuck it out, though, would reap the rewards. “A lot of the students who came out of his class could write a fantastic news article,” he says.

He also developed close relationships with those who did the work. Both Bayusik and Weathered described him as a close adviser and friend.

“He was the guy to give you the right advice,” says Weathered.

The lynchpin of Bob’s teaching philosophy was that students needed to be independent citizens capable of contributing their own ideas to society without being stifled. He was hard on students, in part, because he believed in their abilities.

It was this philosophy that drove him to design the journalism courses as hands-on workshops. Steve Mark, who Bob groomed to take over as adviser to the program in 2000, says he got a sense during that training of how committed Bob was “to the idea that the student-run paper was in the hands of the students.”

Mark says that aside from updates to reflect technological changes, the program’s basic structure remains the same today as it was when Bob created it.

Bob had personal experience with being the lone dissenting voice. Karen says he was unabashedly liberal, even at times radical.

Indeed, the two first met in 1968 at a private home while planning support activities for the anti-Vietnam War Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

After McCarthy lost his party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention, Bob could not support the remaining contenders.

“The Stratford News was the only newspaper in Connecticut that year to urge its readers to write in a candidate for president,” Karen says.

Mark agrees that Bob could be headstrong. “He would fight to the end of the Earth for whatever the issue,” he says.

Often the issue for Bob was students’ rights. At a 1998 forum on student press issues at Bunnell High School in Stratford, the Bridgeport Post reported he shouted out to the room full of student journalists:

“The decision for what goes in (the paper) should be left to those who (write) it. Must we learn at 18 years old that those sons of bitches want to crush the spirit out of us? You cannot surrender your right of freedom of expression.”

Bob also believed wholeheartedly in the community college vision of serving everyone equally. When Connecticut’s legislature in 1977 fell short in its funding for the schools, he wrote a scathing opinion article for the Milford Citizen in which he chastised lawmakers for selling students short.

“If we fail to keep the door fully open,” he wrote, “we will be doing a great injustice not only to those persons who will be deprived of their fair share of our nation’s fullness but also to the city of Milford, the State of Connecticut and ultimately to the United States of America which will be deprived of more complete and contributing members of society.”

Bob “retired” in 2000, partly because of his growing frustration with the college’s administration at the time, says Karen. That year, he spoke at graduation.

“He talked about how much he had learned from the students,” she says, “and how much he admired them.”

Bob continued to teach at Housatonic part-time for the next 12 years. Quinnipiac University student and HCC graduate Victor Rios took a course in British Literature with him in 2009. 

Though Bob was much older, Rios remembers him being full of life and full of jokes. It was clear, he says, that Bob wanted them to enjoy literature as much as he did.

“He used to tell us this story,” says Rios. “Life is like a banquet hall. You’re in there eating and having a good time, when this little bird pops in through one window and goes out through another. You don’t know where it came from or where it’s going. That’s life.”

Rios later credited Bob when he recounted the story in one of his college papers. “I made him a part of my own work,” he says. “So there’s definitely a little bit of him lodged in me.”

In late 2012, Bob had a fall at HCC. His health declined quickly after that, says Karen. By Christmas, the family knew things weren’t going to end well.

Finally, Bob died peacefully at Connecticut Hospice in Branford. Karen praised the staff at the hospice for the way they handled his last hours.

“They knew he was dying, but they still treated him well, and were concerned about his comfort,” she remembers.

Friends and former students all expressed sorrow over his passing.

“Bob was very animated, very alive,” says Kindilien. “He enjoyed what he was doing – so much so that if one were to go where he’s been, there’s a void there now.”

Karen says the family will set up “something in Bob’s name” through the Housatonic Community College Foundation to benefit students.

That way, the profound influence Bob Isaacs had on HCC will live on for years to come.

Racing the Clock to the Printer

"Astronomical Clock" by Anthony Dodd. Used under CC BY-NC 3.0 license.

Ideally, when graphic design finishes putting an issue of Horizons together, the department gives the editor-in-chief a proof to scour. He or she will fix formatting errors, change headlines, and make sure the design is consistent across pages

Things went a little differently for the first issue this semester. On Monday, March 25, Professor Karyn Smith, Editor-in-Chief Dave Weidenfeller and I were discussing the progress we had made toward completing the edition. The student handling layout said he would be ready with a proof by that afternoon. We expected to send the finished version to the printer the following day.

As we were talking, it dawned on us that we had miscalculated. The instructions that had been left for us said the paper needed to be forwarded to the printer by 5 p.m. Monday, not Tuesday. If we waited another day, the paper would not arrive on campus until the following week.

It was already past 3:30.

We leaped into contingency mode. Dave contacted the graphic design student to ask if he could finish in time. He said he could, but there would be no time for a final review.

We'd have to take what we could get.

I got the task of forwarding the final document. Karyn sent me the information that the regular professor, Steve Mark, had left her before going on sabbatical. While I waited to get the PDF from graphic design, I composed emails to the relevant people at Graphic Image in Milford, the company that has been printing our paper for years.

I wasn't exactly sure, though, how I was supposed to give them the document. Back when I had been running Horizons, we would drive to Milford with a printout, as well as a CD containing the PDF, the InDesign file, and all the backup files. Things had changed.

At 4:39 p.m., the graphic design student sent me a text: “Done!” A few moments later, I found the document and opened it to make sure it had transferred successfully.

I found the company's website. There was a login page where users could upload documents. But I had no login information.

It was 4:56; I was running out of time.

I texted Karyn to ask if she had the login information. She did. Once I saw it, I realized I should have been able to guess it.

I only had three minutes left until 5 p.m. I logged into the account and uploaded the PDF file. Then I sent the emails out with the document as an attachment.

Just in time!

The adrenaline rush of barely beating a deadline is something I fell in love with years ago. It had caught me again. As much as I would prefer to have had more time to properly proof the paper, in that moment all I felt was excitement.

Although I could have postponed putting the paper online until the following day, I was too eager to wait. I added it to my documents on Scribd, then posted it to Perspective, the online compliment to Horizons. From there, I updated the Horizons Facebook page, my own Facebook page, and a few other sites.

The paper was out. In a few days, I would receive a call from the driver delivering the physical copies to campus. Then the task of distribution would begin.

For now, though, I could relax. The first issue had made it to press on time.

Note: I neglected to post the first issue on this blog when it originally came out. Though it is becoming dated, I thought you, the reader, might be interested to see the product the students I’ve been working with have produced. It is, after all, one of the main topics I discuss here. With that rationale in mind, I’ve included the online version with this post.

Housatonic Horizons March 2013