Tim is a print professional so nothing is for want of know-how or skill.
Hmm... he may well be an expert in print production but his skills are perhaps slightly wanting in other areas of the production process... which isn't meant as a criticism. Far from it. All those involved in Arrivee do sterling work and I appreciate their efforts. It must be a mammoth task to put an issue together, and clearly a lot of time and energy is put into it - all unpaid too, I presume. Chapeau to all the editors.
Thing is, I have a certain amount of professional expertise myself and sometimes when I'm reading Arrivee, I find it hard to resist the urge to get the red pen out...
What's the editorial process behind an issue? Is there an editorial committee who decide what articles go in which issue? Is sub-editing and proofreading a team effort? Or is it a one-man job from beginning to end?
I'm contemplating the rash move of Getting Involved but I fear a greater level of commitment is involved than I may be able to offer.
d.
Citoyen
Francis is being very kind. I am not an expert in print production, I just worked in the printing industry as a typesetter and proof reader. Production for print was always handled by the other departments. I just bumble along trying to get it right.
There's not really an editorial process behind each issue. More often than not, editors are scrabbling round for copy to fill the pages and all the little gaps that are left when an article doesn't fit the page. You might have noticed that FOUR of the articles were written by one author and TWO by another. Good job they bothered to write, it would be down to a 32pp without them. You might also have noticed the excess of photos in the current issue. I was going to send 60pp instead of the normal 64p to the printers because of shortage of copy, but postponed publication for a few days while I travelled to photograph the Mille Cymru to fill the four remaining pages. It costs £100 more to print a 60pp mag than a 64pp mag, believe it or not.
Basically, nearly everything that gets sent in gets published. It is a club magazine after all, written by its members. Get the red pen out by all means but let us have your thoughts, don't just whinge on a forum. Compare the full colour A4 mag to the A5 b/w of a few years ago and see what you think. It takes many more hours to produce than the black and white mag of those days.
All the editing, sub-editing, typesetting, page make-up, scanning, typing, phone calls, emails, all the digital imaging that takes up many hours in PhotoShop, all the choosing and cropping of images to fit the page, pre-flighting, multiple hours to upload the lot to the printers' website and wait while their pre-flight software finds any errors - everything that goes into the magazine is the work of ONE person - the editor for that issue.
Yes, it would be nice to break up solid pages of text with more sub-heads and pull quotes, but very often that means the article spreads over to another page with a few lines of text on – not very practical. Subbing out a few lines will often ruin an article.
Same with the intros, most times there is a natural break before the article starts. For the Eiger Sanction, p.8, it just wouldn't fit in the usual style and the picture was the wrong shape to fill the page. "You can't always get what you want" to quote MJ.
There are lots of ways to improve the layout, but all these take up extra production time. The Calendar alone take the best part of a day to format and get into shape – maybe you have some ideas on how to speed that process up from a web-page file?
You could submit a nice new design for us - it's been in its present layout for a long time and could do with a make-over. It's a club magazine, it doesn't belong to the editors - get involved!
So, you would be welcomed aboard the editorial team to add your expertise. For a start, how about putting your money where your mouth is and taking over the advertising manager's job (currently held by me) - suit you sir! You will get a foot in the door of
Arrivée production and who knows – editors can come and go as in any other AUK position.
Helen: I valued your proof reading for me last year when I was really pressed. I will be pleased to use your services again. If you would like to get more involved, with consent from Sheila and Maggie, maybe we could get all copy directed to you for each issue to edit, format and spell check so it reaches the editor ready to go.
David Martin: Apologies, I got your name wrong on p.1 credit, all done in a last minute rush. Thanks for all the super images you sent. As for cropping your mate out of the pic, all down to the shape of the image you sent. That was one of the few landscape mode shots that you submitted. Someone had to be cropped. Nearly all your others were portrait mode, which fit well into an A4 publication. Landscape pics don't fit into a 9 pics per page very easily.
I don't think we'll ever get our images how we really want them. A nice clear image from a digi camera arrives, it gets cropped, Photoshopped a bit, converted to CMYK which always changes the colours slightly, and then gets printed with only FOUR ink colours onto paper. You are viewing the image on your computer screen at millions of colours. A bit like recording hi-fi onto a cassette tape, and then making lots of duplicate tapes – something gets lost along the way. A high proportion of the images in the current issue don't resemble the colour, highlights and shadows I have on my calibrated monitor. I never know what it's going to look like until I receive a copy.
Tim