This week I will hand out two excerpts from a book by Nancy Brigham titled "How to Do Leaflets, Newsletters & Newspapers." It's an old book, and the technology is way out of date, but it's the best thing I've ever found on the practical, down-to-earth, everyday reality of getting a publication on the street. Brigham did public relations for the United Auto Workers, and she wrote the book for members of the editorial committees in UAW locals who had the responsibility of getting out a newsletter for rank-and-file members of the local. She speaks from experience. And she is very, very practical.
- In class Tuesday, we will go over the first handout, which combines snippets on editorial committees, relating to readers, libel and copyright. How does the way she talks about relationships compare to the way Carol Saller talks about them in "The Subversive Copy Editor?"
- For class Thursday, read Brigham's chapter on planning an issue of a publication. A lot of it is about scheduling and keeping track of copy flow. (What's that mean? Link here for a definition.) How much of this can we use in today's world? More than you might think.
At left, out-of-date technology used in Nancy Brigham's day to resize pictures instead of dragging the corners in a desktop publishing program. Artwork at right, below, shows two of the steps (out of five or six) involved in resizing a picture (Brigham 162-63).
When Brigham's book came out, the World Wide Web was an experimental program of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, originally the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), Windows 95 lay four years in the future, desktop publishing was a trendy new concept that nobody really understood, and people were putting together publications with manual typewriters, scissors, pots of rubber cement, production wheels and "pica sticks," which were metal rulers marked off in a printer's measure called picas. (There were six picas to an inch, and you learned to convert them to inches in your head when you were laying out a page.) Every single technological point that Brigham mentions is obsolete.
But she has the psychology nailed.
In 1991, Brigham coordinated the UAW's Local Union Press Association and conducted workshops for locals around the country. Later on, she designed the UAW's first website and served as webmaster before getting a master's degree in information science from the University of Michgan. She is now a communication strategies consultant and is active in the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981). So a lot of her examples are drawn from organized labor, but what she says about publishing a magazine is good advice for everybody."Leaflets, Newsletters & Newspapers" out of print now, but it's still widely available. Amazon.com has 11 new copies and 60 used copies available, at prices ranging from 1 cent ($0.01) on up. I'd recommend buying it! Even if the technology is out of date, you can still get a penny's worth of use out of the chapters on editorial policy, style, "the facts, finding and using them," interviewing, composing and cropping photos, "writing for the people," editing and layout. She also has tips on things like how to reach your target audience with flyers and what to put in a three-fold brochure that have obviously been tested in the real world. One example:
"The best way to offend readers is to throw at the top of your flyer a screaming headline saying, "Vote for Tom Gallagher!" People who agree with you will nod their heads and walk on, and those who disagree will shake their heads and move on. Many will mumble to themselves: "Who do they thihk they are, telling me how to vote?!"She'll even suggest what you might say instead, but to find out you'll have to pay your penny and order the book.
If you do, it'll be a penny well spent. Again, Brigham has the psychology of publishing in the real world nailed.
Besides, you can always look at the pictures in the margins of antiquated technologies that we don't have to use anymore! Something like that can bring you a world of comfort when the latest version of Windows is freezing up on you and you're having trouble getting your software to do what you want it to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment