Monday, Monday

I'd like to post a few props for those people working Monday night. Even with 2 people on vacation , and someone having to leave an hour after arriving, we managed to get 4 papers out well before deadline. In fact, we had all 4 papers' A/News pages out before Wausau's deadline. To me, that speaks to our efficiency and teamwork skills.

Extra special thanks to Mark Multer for proofing pages for us and Rob Johnson for staying much later than he intended.

--Kristy

Sunday's edition

Thanks to everyone who posted components of our Person of the Year package for Sunday.

Your efforts made the creation of a related eyepiece (that strip across the top of our homepage) easy.

Eyepiece creation may be the topic for my next video training session. Have you checked out the four sessions I've already recorded? If not, please find a few minutes to check them out. They are saved on CWNG-EDIT under WEB TRAINING and offer something for everyone, I think.

Thanks,

— Brian O.

New newshole

From what I can tell, Sunday went rather smooth with are new newshole configurations. The only significant glitch was when our photo server went down for a while in the afternoon. The managing editors had their plans in place no later than Friday afternoon, and I think that helped a lot.

Newshole cuts

Just a brief note of thanks for the close attention I suspect all the copy desk members have been paying to the changes coming down the pike next week.

Getting the final details right will depend on our last line of defense, the copy desk.

That's why Mark B. has paid special attention to trying to keep you informed.

Any questions at all, please ask.

— Mark T.

Another critique

As promised, I'm back with a quick critique on our how we're doing at promoting/linking items in print for online.

We had a pair of videos to promote on 1A today and I think what the page designer did worked fine. I may work up a more abbreviated sig we can use when we need a second reference to video on a page (maybe just adding "video online" would work), but given the options at hand, I thought was fine.

Had we desired (or had the space) we could have referred to our special section on the economy in the Christmas tree story. We could have referred to it on 6A in the Marshfield "exchange" story, as well. Unfortunately, neither of these stories were included in the "Economy in Trouble" special section, either. We could even refer to it in an economy story on a wire page like 7A. or our Nation/World page from GNS.

We didn't have the gallery up for the Judd performance until late this morning, so it was good that we didn't promo the gallery in print.

The Marathon Cup story could have included a sig referring to the earlier gallery or Varsity.

On a side note, I'd like to applaud whomever created the promos for today's WDH 1A. It included a well-placed cutout, varying (but not clashing) headlines (in color, font and size) and looked nice.

You all work hard to help connect all the different components online and in print and I appreciate it. It's tough to keep things that are a couple of weeks old (the economy special section) top of mind. If you have ideas on how to keep these weeks old items fresh in your workflow, we can keep them fresh for our readers.

Thanks,

Brian O.

Dates and phone numbers

I've been thinking for a while about dates in our papers. Since we post so much to the Web, would it make more sense to use the date rather than the day of the week? I've even almost slipped up and printed briefs after the fact if the date was stripped in an earlier edit.
Today, Jon and I were discussing 715 in relationship to phone numbers for MNH. Style for MNH is to include the area code when it would be long distance for Marshfield callers. However, I can't remember all of the communities for which you dial it. Not all readers are in Marshfield, either, so the area code might come in handy. (Who knows where Web-based readers are located?) Looking ahead a few years when we overlay another area code, the 715 will become necessary for callers.
Would it make sense to be proactive and add the area code?
What do others think?

Mystique

Thanks, Jeff

Jeff Williams at Wisconsin Rapids sent us an e-mail Sunday listing the Rapids budget, just as he does Monday through Friday. Thanks, Jeff. That helped us know when the budget was ready for us.