Week 1

Last Thursday, I went in after school from 2:30 and stayed until 5. I was introduced to all of the staff. The floor of the newsroom is situated by sections: the editors all sit together in one part of the room, the reporters all sit together, and the photography staff all sit together. The marketing staff also sits together as a group on the other side of the room. I got situated at a desk and started learning how to use the Adobe suite that the paper uses. The main components of their operating system include a program called NewsEdit which allows the staff to quickly forward information to their editors, as well as see the stories in a layout form (the program also shows how many inches long the article will be once in print), InDesign (used to actually lay out the pages), Bridge (with synthesizes all of the information from NewsEdit and Photoshop so they are compatible) and Photoshop (to edit and prepare photographs so they are able to be inserted into InDesign). They do not use any form of the Microsoft Office Suite: instead, every article is written in NewsEdit and thereby eliminates the need for a word-processing system.

This week, I started working on an article for the Times about the changes to the Cape Ann Farmer's Market. It took me two days to write it and do the research for the article. The actual article was published in today's newspaper (April 13, in the Business News section). I will try to scan in a copy of the article as an image posting.

UPDATE: While I was working on the Farmer's Market article, I also did a brief article on an upcoming anti-drug presentation at Addison Gilbert Hospital. Click HERE to read it.