Back at Elon!

So, first of all, I want to make it known that we were done with production before 11 p.m. tonight. It was the greatest night of my life.

Getting to go to the CMA conference was such a great experience for me. I got so many new ideas that I want to try at The Pendulum, and I can’t wait to share the things that I learned with the other executive staff members.

We always talk about “taking more design risks” with the Style section and the Sports section, but no one is ever really sure where to go from there. Do we throw in a random font that may not make sense to someone not on staff? Do we tilt photos? (Different staff members will tell you different answers to this one!) The sessions at the conference gave me so many new ideas on how to take risks with our newspaper, but risks that will pay off and not just be a one-time thing that doesn’t work out.

It’s a major plus that, in addition to learning all these cool new things we can do (which I’m not revealing in this blog so that they’ll be new(!) and exciting(!) when they’re actually in our paper), I got to strengthen my friendship with some of our staff members, and of course, our adviser. This was probably one of the best things about the whole trip, wandering around New York with some of the best people.

While New York was definitely a blast, I’m so excited to be back at Elon and ready to take our paper to new places!

-Kristen Case

How to Write the Fake News

I’m going to be completely honest, I don’t have a lot to say about this session. This was supposed to be the opening keynote, and I was under the impression that it was supposed to be more general and something that catered to a lot more people. Hallie Haglund and Zhubin Parang who are both writers for The Daily Show basically spent the whole hour and a half talking about Jon Stewart and what their day-to-day life is like. Which is great and everything if you’re interested in comedy or comedy writing, but I’m not in the least. I didn’t learn anything that might be useful for me, and was actually rather bored the whole time. I may have spent a good portion of the session – because that is what it turned in to – engaged with my phone. It was basically just a question-and-answer session, where Hallie and Zhubin couldn’t even get through much of an answer before there was someone else who had a question.

The one thing I did learn: you shouldn’t try to be clever and witty when asking questions of comedy writers. Dumb.

On the upside, Hearst tour tomorrow! Then lunch with Rebecca for our last hour or so in the city and it’s back to Maryland for me. Bittersweet, because I’m leaving New York City but I get to see my family and eat lots of delicious home-cooked food! (Which I have been craving for weeks, ask anyone in the office.)

-Kristen Case

Hot Pages: What’s Trending in College Design

This may have been the most exciting session of the day, not because it was particularly compelling or anything, but because The Pendulum was featured in it! Randy Stano, who led the session, talked about the popular trends in college newspaper design and what works in design. He also talked briefly about what didn’t work, but the focus was on the good things that papers were doing.

It was great to know that a page from our newspaper made it into his presentation, that he deemed it good enough to mention, but I didn’t agree at all! It was an inside page, from the Sept. 14th edition, and it had zero art on the page. There were two SGA stories on it (which he dinged us for, because both used “SGA” in the headlines and that’s a no-no), one of which had a more online box, the briefs, a correction box and the calendar. That was it. It’s the kind of page that makes me so unhappy because there wasn’t a single picture. Just a lot of boring text. He praised us for being able to work with so much text and the fact that the page had good horizontal and vertical movement, which were both valid points. I just wish there had been art, or that we had managed to get recognized for a more interesting page! There have been so many other great pages that I wish could have made it in to his presentation, and instead we had a page with no art. Sad face.

He really emphasized that we don’t have to be so serious and that we can take risks with our papers because we are still in college and don’t need to be stuck on being stuck up.

ALSO! He had these great examples of turning things sideways! Which we’re totally going to implement at the paper. It’s something that you can really only do once or twice a year and for something great, but it’s going to happen! Look out for sideways Pendulum pages in the future.

-Kristen Case

Get That Job

This was one of the session that lived up to my expectations almost completely. I didn’t expect to be a super thrilling session, but I figured it was one that I could come away with a lot from it, and I was totally right. It was all about breaking into the magazine industry in New York as a designer.

Some of the main things that I took away from it were that the design staffs are fairly small, so creatives have to “wear a lot of hats.” Also, the panel, which was made up of Leah Bailey and Dennis Wynn, assured the audience that you can exist on a freelance salary. Everyone seems to have this idea that being a freelancer means that you’re working out of the corner of your bedroom on occasion, but that’s not the case at all. They both were adamant that freelancing just means you’re paying for your own insurance, and it was just a status on how you get your check, it’s still a full-time job. Another big thing they emphasized was that magazine design is all about working from a proactive stand-point, instead of the reactive designing that happens at a newspaper. The art directors at magazines do a lot more dictating what visual content and photos go on a page.

They also talked a lot about portfolios, and I took away a lot of things that I’m going to implement in my working portfolio.

-Kristen Case

Chicken Salad Part II

Koretzky impressed me so much yesterday that I was seriously looking forward to today’s Chicken Salad session. I didn’t see how it was too different from yesterday’s session, other than rewriting ledes, but I was excited nonetheless.

He definitely talked about a lot of useful things in his session. But the big things I took away from it weren’t about design in the least. The major things that I got from it were that 1.) we’re right to emphasize NOT putting dates at the top of your story unless it’s really, really relevant and 2.) stories should be more about perspective than process. Student voices should be emphasized, and administration/administrative things should be down played.

I was a little bummed that he designed the majority of the pages in an alternative magazine style because it isn’t really something we can implement at The Pendulum. Also, while I appreciated and enjoyed a lot of his designs, I wasn’t sure how I felt about his word choice in his rewrites. I completely agree that we need to be writing more like we speak to keep our audience, who is mainly students, interested. However, we are still writing for faculty members as well, and I don’t really think they would appreciate the lack of professionalism that using the word “sucked” indicates. It kind of makes it seem like we aren’t taking our work seriously and just using slang like it doesn’t matter that we have an older audience as well as a college-aged one.

Also, as much as I enjoy him as a presenter, I feel like he shows some things solely for shock value. Yesterday, his Chicken Salad session included a full-frontal nude photo, which was actually relevant to the topic and had a purpose. Today, he included a photo at the end of his presentation that wasn’t really a photo, but a woman’s naked body made completely out of letters and type. It was thrown in at the end of his presentation to show us the power of type, but it really seemed like it was just stuck at the end to shock the audience. He’s a captivating enough speaker on his own, he doesn’t need stupid gimmicks like the promise of a “naked” woman to keep people paying attention.

-Kristen Case

Monday is over!

Well, not really. There’s still dinner to get and shopping to do, but all of the sessions are done for the day.

The last session I attended today was not at all what I was expecting. The session it was supposed to be (Want to Land a Cool Gig Overseas? Here’s How) got canceled because the speaker had a family emergency and couldn’t attend. HUGE bummer, because, while New York is where I think I’ll eventually end up, I would love to work overseas first.

Instead, I ended up sitting through a session titled: Defending Design in the Age of Consolidation. ‘Okay,’ I thought to myself, ‘that probably won’t be so bad. It’s gonna be about why design is still important and maybe I’ll learn more about what my dream job is going to be.’ It was also the only SND session I went to, and those were the ones that really got played up on the conference site, so I figured it had to be good, regardless.

So false. The presenter spent 30 minutes talking about how Hearst had bought his newspaper and three others and made them all use the same design templates and the same set of designers. He spent a good portion of that half an hour talking about the fonts that they had custom made for them and how no one else had the fonts and what exactly the fonts said about the four publications. Cool and all because I’m a font geek, but this session taught me nothing. I learned the phrase “design hub” and that was about it.

I definitely wasn’t the only one disappointed that Nick Mrozowski couldn’t be there, when Lee Steele announced that the original session wasn’t going to take place, about half the people in the room left, and then as the session went on, more and more people snuck out of the room.

In other news, they announced the people who got to take media tours, and I AM GOING ON A HEARST MEDIA TOUR. TO COSMO AND FOOD NETWORK MAGAZINE. In case you couldn’t tell, I lost my mind a little bit. My goal for the media tour is to make them give me a job, and then I’ll skip the last two years of college and just live in New York and work for Hearst. Who needs to finish college if you’ve already gotten a fantastic job.

That’s realistic, right?

-Kristen Case

Sorry, We Decided to Go with Someone Else

This is one of the only sessions that I’m going to this weekend that wasn’t based around design, it was solely about breaking into the magazine business and how Breia Brissey broke into working for Entertainment Weekly.

After a great lunch at Café Metro, which was like an upgraded Pangeos (I got shrimp in my pasta! And fresh mozzarella), and some frantic blogging, none of us were really ready to go back to sessions, but Breia was so relatable, it felt more like listening to a friend tell a story than sitting through a session. She was able to keep the discussion funny while still being realistic about the jobs available in the magazine industry. She encouraged everyone to be honest with the people they are applying to work for – she told This Old House Magazine that she knew nothing about what they  did and they still hired her for several months.

It was definitely interesting to hear about her experience with moving to New York and trying to find her dream job, and she was very nice, but I don’t really feel like I learned anything I didn’t already know.

-Kristen Case

Chicken Salad part 1

This session may have been the best possible way for me to start my experience at the CMA ’12 conference.

Despite the strange name, which never got explained, was fantastic. The man who ran it, Michael Koretzky, was hilarious and kept the audience’s attention, seemingly without a lot of effort. The room was absolutely packed, I suspect a lot of people came for the promised nudity and profanity in the session but they stayed because Koretzky made it worth while. He bribed people with gold dollars to answer questions that he asked, even if they were wrong or just clearly trying too hard to be funny.

While I knew a lot of the things that he talked about, the basic design rules and the points he brought up, I got a lot out of this session. The Pendulum is trying to take more risks with its design of things, and this session gave me so many new ideas that I can’t wait to try out. Koretzky said something that really stuck with me, that I hope to implement in our newspaper, and that was that this is the time to take risks, because our livelihood isn’t riding on it. The worst that can happen is that the administration is unhappy with us, or we do something that doesn’t work.

Hey, we can’t do any worse than the front page that Florida Atlantic University paper, University Press, ran that was titled, “We Sucked and It Blew.”

-Kristen Case