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By Laura King | TPA
Of all the expenses associated with newspaper layout/production, perhaps the costliest is time. You’re already spending 20 or 30 hours a week designing pages and building ads. Who has time to learn InDesign CS5.5?
So what if you just … stop? Outsource your layout and production. That’s one of several ideas speaker/trainer Russell Viers will present in his seminar, “Create More Free Time,” at the upcoming Texas Press Midwinter Conference & Trade Show.
“What I’m suggesting is, don’t even be in that business,” Viers said. “Be in the writing business. Be in the photography business. Be in the ad sales business. Be in the marketing business. Don’t be in the layout and production business. If you’re not able to make the investment in time and money to be really good at your game, you’re not going to be successful in the next 10 years in content gathering and serving your community.”
Sound harsh?
“I know that sounds harsh, but here’s the thing: How many newspapers in Texas do you know who are already strapped just putting out a 10-page paper every week?” Viers asked. “They don’t have time for a website. They don’t have time to learn how to do tablet publishing and mobile publishing and building websites and learning InDesign CS200 or whatever. They don’t have time for that.”
So get someone else to do it for you. Great. How?
“What if, down the road, there’s a larger newspaper that could be trained to really know how to build pages very quickly, build ads quickly,” he said. “That would give them the capacity to start laying out pages and ads for smaller newspapers and charging them.
“So now I’m a small newspaper and instead of spending 23 hours a week laying out my paper, I’m writing a check and I sit down at my computer and I write my stories. I may be emailing the ads to the newspaper, but the rest of the time I’m out taking photographs, writing stories, selling ads and marketing the paper to the community.
“That 20 to 30 hours per week that was 100 percent production is turned into a line item on the ledger, and that’s justified through increased ad sales, more content and now you are at least looking toward an electronic future.
“We’re going to need more content to keep our readers happy. Here’s a good example of that: Historically, if you had one photograph of the football game in the newspaper, that was sufficient. Now, when I go to a website, I want to see a gallery, so a newspaper needs to have the capacity to not only go out and photograph 500 shots of a football game, but sort it down to 50 to 100 that are good, adjust them and upload them to the gallery on their website, so that drives traffic to their website. And those are the kind of things we’re just not going to be able to do if we’re spending 40 hours a week in front of InDesign laying out a newspaper.”
Questions? Ask Russell Viers yourself. Join us Friday, Jan. 20 at the Midwinter Conference. There’s something for everyone at this seminar. If outsourcing layout and production isn’t for you, Viers has a few ideas that may help you improve your workflow. Don’t miss out! |
