- Thanksgiving at the Endeavor
- Homeless pets
- Editorial
Design
You need to put some more attitude into the whole issue. You can see some attitude in the Opinion section but the rest of the paper is laid out too matter-of-factly.
Content should dictate design, so when designing your pages, you need to ask the same question the writer of the story and the photographer was supposed to ask: What's the story about? You don't want to design a story about a skate park the same way you would about homeless people.
So ask: What's the story about?
If it is about homeless people who could soon lose the only temporary shelter they have, then how do you design that? If it is about homeless people that get one good meal from a shelter that will soon be forced to close, how do you design that?
Your design should reflect key emotions and other elements that pertain to a particular story:
Immediacy
Speed
Grace
Beauty
Desperation
Celebration
Frustration
Anger
White is better than gray
Screen art as a backdrop for a story still make for gray pages. Instead of screening art as you did on the overtraining story, get art and use your white space.
Here too, you need to ask yourself what is your story about? If it is about more than one thing you need a nut graf that tells the reader that upfront. The Endeavor's nut graf was in the headline, but it belongs in the story.
This is a story not just about grateful people eating dinner. But that's what the entire first page was about. It was also about how the Endeavor is reshaping its image. But the reader doesn't find that out until the jump. The problem with the structure as published is that it inflates the news angle (the turkey dinner) over the news (the image remake).
Slow Down
You place Lori Dengler on the island of Sumatra but then you rush through this: citizens of Langi village survived the 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami because their oral 
history passed down emergency planning.Break down this sentence and you can see all the elements you stuffed into it: Langi villagers 2005 Tsunami Oral history Emergency planning
Instead try to devote a paragraph to each.
What/where is Langi?
Tiny little village with thatched roof huts?
Modern little town with flushing toilets and satellite television? What was this 2o05 Tsunami?
Remember the guy who just came out of the cave after 30 years. He doesn't know what you are talking about. Explain what happened.
What's this about oral history?
Did generation after generation of dentistry save this village? Or are you saying that mother passed on information to daughters for gen
eration after generation. When you do explain it in the second column you still rush through it in a confusing way.You say:
The history explains exactly what each person' task is in the event of the disaster.But what is this history?
Do the villagers meet once a year in a rite in which each person learns the task he or she will be expected to take on when the ground shakes? Or is that left to the father or the mother or the grandmother to do and how often and when do they pass on the information? When a child is three? 10? On their wedding day?
And what do you mean by emergency planning?
Did generations after generations know about stocking up on cans of Spam and bottled water as we do? Or was this the information: When you feel the ground shake, run for the hills.
You then needed to bring Dengler home. You leave her in Sumatra but have her talking about HSU. Place her back on campus somewhere and have her imagine the disaster here. The story feels disjointed. You go from Sumatra to HSU back to Sumatra back to HSU. And you tell us that HSU isn't prepared but make the contrasts more stark:
In Langi, villagers make sure that each hut has enough food and water to last for three weeks. But that's not the case here on campus. Neither the J, nor the Depot would be able to feed students for long.
You needed to outline this story.
If you did this is how it might have turned out:
If a natural disaster were to happen tomorrow, good luck. Neither the Depot nor the J have enough supplies to feed students for long, and those mass casualty trailers you see around campus? There isn't much inside them.
And HSU is the most prepared campus in the CSU system for a natural disaster.
Contrast that to a small village on the island of Sumatra, which was hit in 2005 with a Tsunami that killed thousands of people. The villagers survived because each person in it knew exactly what to do in the event of a disaster, and had supplies prepared well in advance.
Just ask Geology Professor Lori Dengler. She knows all about natural disasters and she visited Sumatra and saw for herself how emergency planning means the difference between life and death.
Don't ignore a big pile o' money.
The housing project will cost $48 million. That's $18,000 per bed. Is that high or low for a project of this size? Are they over or underspending? Are we spending $48 million because that is what the state is giving us, or does the need demand it?
Show your reader!
Where are the photos of Burt Nordstrom and Carl Coffey? I can't believe the university has no photos of those two people. Get them.
And you couldn't get any fungi art?
Even I can draw a mushroom.
Empower your stories with active verbs.
Instead of:
A mushroom hunter, walking in the forest can make a drunk look sober. Head down, staring at the ground, looking for any little bump under the leaves, the hunter is anxious to find the next prize.
You will get:
When a mushroom hunter walks in the forest he makes a drunk look sober. His head is down as he stares at the ground. He looks for any little bump under the leaves, anxious to find the next prize. But he's totally lucid.
He has to be. He knows the right mushroom is worth good money. The wrong one will kill you. So don't try it yourself. Or before you do, talk to Dave Largent or at least read his book.
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