Inside Scoop is a weekly column about the operation of the Spartan Daily, San Jose State's student newspaper. Yes, I'm late this week :(
We put out three papers this week: Tuesday ("the pride issue"), Wednesday ("the football team wants to win issue"), and Thursday ("the parking issue").
We mostly tried too hard on this issue. We tried to do a cutout on the front page plus a text-wrap illustration, both of which required redesigning the front page later in the evening. Those would might have worked later on in the semester, but hurt us time wise. Also, there's not a single picture of a student on the front page.
I wrote a review of Taylor Swift's Lover that I was rather proud of. Just took me until like 3a.m. to get over my writer's block.
I also helped shoot the women's soccer game the previous Thursday. At the time I was pretty demotivated that our photos did not turn out that well, but they weren't that bad. Some were pretty good.
More importantly, I got to school at 6:30a.m. to deliver the newspaper to the various newsstands around campus. We hadn't hired our carriers yet, so some of us were still filling in on delivery duty. This gave me a decent amount of insight on how people actually consume our newspaper. We usually put teasers for some of the inside content on the bottom of the page, but then they're not visible in our newsstands. So now we're trying just keeping them above the fold.
Starting to get a bit faster, but the quality was definitely a bit lower. We messed up on a lot of small design things, like text being too close to lines, jumps being misaligned with columns, and the front page cutline having two people labeled as "(right)".
I don't think we did a great job with the front-page textbook story, mostly because we didn't talk to any professors. It's something we could/should continue to look into, but the importance to students will die down a bit because they're no longer actively purchasing them.
Also, we spelled a name wrong, and that really sucks.
Yeah, we cut it a little too close to the 2a.m. print deadline. The last four pages to be finished (1, 2, 4-5) were definitely rushed and had some major issues. Mostly it was a lack of planning, and leaving a lot of the design and layout elements until the last minute. We had some paper sketches and dummies, but we really should have thrown stuff into InDesign a lot earlier.
Even though we were doing a doubletruck/spread, the 4 different elements (campus voices, ParkStash story, ALPRs, and infographic) just seem like they were thrown onto the page with no consideration for creating a coherent design. The news packaging was good, but the layout didn't really represent that.
We really killed it in the Opinion section. A fantastic editorial cartoon that overshadowed the editorial, a column about pending abortion care legislation, perspective on gaming and violence, and some memes.
The "Spartan meme of the week" replaces the former "Spartunes" feature, really as an attempt to boost reader engagement. Spartunes involved editors picking a song that fit some theme, and then putting them all in a shared Spotify playlist. The main problem was that the only interesting part about Spartunes was which editor picked which song - and it's only interesting if you know the editors themselves. And given that most people don't, it's not very interesting.
In comparison, people seem to enjoy the memes of the week, and we've already had at least one student submit memes for consideration. That's more reader engagement than Spartunes can claim.
I also delivered the newspaper again today morning. It was fun, and I hope to never do it again. I'm just not a morning person.
Inside Scoop is a weekly column about the operation of the Spartan Daily, San Jose State's student newspaper.
It's been a minute, but school started on Wednesday, and we had to put out another issue (10MB PDF). It turned out pretty nicely I think. We started working on it a few weeks beforehand, assigning stories, and then beginning to meet up and layout the pages starting a week beforehand (at least for the people who were already in town).
It was a true collaborative effort, with basically everyone on the editorial board contributing to the paper in one way or another, something I was really proud of. All the stories were written by editors, which was nice from the editing point of view (since they were well written to begin with), but it caused a few problems from the layout/production side, since the editors also had to focus on editing their own stories rather than just focusing on the pages.
For the first issue, we tried to make a "Welcome Guide" of sorts, partially to attract new students as readers. I don't think it really worked for the latter part, but we have a lot of work to do in that area. We're working on moving newsstands around to be in more convenient locations for readers to pick up, as well as looking into doing some focus testing to see what students are looking for.
The other main issue we've been dealing with is the rollout of our new website on https://sjsunews.com/. The architecture is bizzare to say the least - it's an AngularJS frontend calling out to a Drupal backend, where we enter content. I'm not really sure why that architecture was picked versus just creating a Drupal skin, but I also entered the process pretty late. I usually don't disclose to people my software background, to avoid all of the "oh can you help with this computer issue" type questions or get the responsibility of the website thrust upon me, but in this case I wish I had earlier. ¯\(ツ)/¯
There are a decent amount of features missing but those are being worked on, I hope. Functionally, it's a pretty big regression from our other outdated website, but the design is nice when everything is finally rolled out.
As a sidenote, I also figured out why the old website was so slow to post articles - it used to take 10-15 minutes to show up. The old website was effectively a static site generator, and one of the sidebar items was "Recent articles". So whenever a new article is published, it would have to update every single generated page...which was over 30,000 of them. Yeah, not surprised that it took 10 minutes to publish a story.
All of the editors this semester are going to be writing a column or blog or some regular feature thing. So this is going to be mine - an inside look at the production of the Spartan Daily.
Originally posted on mastodon.technology.
I mostly set up Qubes last night, but Thunderbird did not migrate well at all, so I'm not checking my email right now.
Specifically, all of the mail filters on my POP accounts broke. :/
Originally posted on mastodon.technology.
In other #HTTPS news, a feature to automatically rewrite HTTP links on #Wikipedia to HTTPS (using domains on the HSTS preload list) just landed on our beta cluster. Full production rollout coming soon.
More details: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T200745
Originally posted on mastodon.technology.
I did the first test run of LibUp 2.0 (formerly libraryupgrader) last night across MediaWiki extension repositories, only hit one show-stopper bug (oops).
Here's an example: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/AJAXPoll/+/522645 I think the coolest new feature is the hashtags, which allow you to filter patches for exactly which libraries were upgraded, which CVEs were fixed, etc.
Originally posted on mastodon.technology.
End of an era, #MediaWiki will no longer silently accept "A potato" as part of a valid timestamp: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-api-announce/2019-June/000146.html
(Don't worry, PHP will still take it!)
