Showing posts with label production desk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label production desk. Show all posts

Falling Off A Blog: The Web Production Desk

One of my senior colleagues has written an interesting blog post on the web production desk and how production staff can make the transition from print to web.

This is a transition I've been going through myself in the past 18 months or so, and the post outlines many of the skills I'm having to learn.

Falling Off A Blog: The Web Production Desk

Shows, crows, and the busiest day of the year

It's press day in show week – perhaps the busiest day in our magazine's calendar. With twice as many news pages as usual to sub, lay out, proof, correct, send down and approve, all of the production desk has a hectic five or six hours. Not to mention that our technical editor has to do all of his proofing remotely, as he's down at the show too.

Actually we've gone to press now, which is why I have a few minutes to write this post. We'll find out tomorrow if there were any major screw-ups, I suppose.

I did nearly let an embarrassing one slip through earlier – tapping in a headline for one story, my finger must have slipped, as instead of writing 'New Magnum cab draws crowd' I wrote 'New Magnum cab draws crows'. Quite a surreal image. Fortunately I spotted it before it went out on proof. I'm sure our proofreaders would have picked up on it, though I can only imagine the stick they would have given me...

A production desk Christmas

The pre-Christmas period is one of the busiest and most stressful for us on our magazine. Not only do we have a bumper Christmas issue to prepare but we work on the two following issues at the same time (no one wants to come in between Christmas and New Year, after all).

The production desk is a mess of layouts, proofs, plans and charts, and the smallest mistake can lead to much confusion. Earlier today there was a great example of the effect this can have on the best of us when I noticed that our production editor, who is normally a calm, reasonable person, was looking a little harassed.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" I asked him.

"Yes. Line up some journalists against a wall and shoot them for me," he replied, before stalking off.

Glad to see we're all getting into the Christmas spirit...