Well, Julia has finally made her Toronto post, so that’s good! Hopefully one of her New Year’s resolutions was to post more than once every four months in 2009.
I should mention that Data is currently on vacation. He is in Florida at a series of dog shows called the Florida Classic Cluster with handler Kathryn Mines. We dropped him off in New Jersey on Sunday, but the shows didn’t start until Thursday (took a few days for her to drive down), so we’ll be sure to post how he performs. The shows end on January 18th, and he will be back around the 20th. If he does well, we will try to continue showing him until he becomes a “champion,” then breed him. If he does poorly, we’ll chop off his balls.
Here are some pages, one is a low-resolution (hence shitty quality, but printed fine) version of a 2008 wrapup, the other is the January 9th front page.
Here are pages I did for Sunday’s paper – the front and the cover of our “Perspectives” section.
Today we had a follow-up on the counterfeit busts from yesterday. This time the focus was on local retailers and the fake bills they’d seen. I put together a graphic with ways to detect counterfeit money and, I think it worked out alright. The graphic I like, but I don’t like the way the rest of the page plays with it.
Here’s the front page for tomorrow. We had a late-breaking story about a Secret Service / local police / state police / Homeland Security sting operation on a counterfeit ring that was centered in Danbury, but went as far south as Florida. I had an idea for the graphic. In the end, time grew short and, though the basic element of the graphic is intact (including a border I created from the actual border of a $100 bill), there was no time to flush out all of the names and details, leaving the graphic a little empty. Oh well, at least it was something different.
Here’s the front page for December 9. I’m really only posting it because I’m proud of my photo bar text (the story is about how recycling centers are struggling with low selling prices for raw materials).
This is part one of what will probably be a long line of headlines that I wrote that didn’t make the pages. There have been a few others, but this one I really liked.
The story: Ex-Olympic official pleads guilty to child pornography charges.
My headline: Let the shames begin
Vetoed because it applied judgement to him, which I understand on one level, but the guy did just admit to child porn.
My first presidential election in a true newsroom was an interesting one. Being the low man on the totem pole means I was given a fairly bland page to create. Of course everyone had ideas for the front page, but overall I think it worked out pretty well. There are a few things I would have done differently had I been designing it, but I can’t really complain. Maybe in 2012 I’ll get the page to myself. Here is our front page, followed by the page I designed.
How does one place six stories about the candidates for three state senate races on one page without favoring any story over another?
If you’re like me, you would mathematically calculate the exact dimensions necessary to provide each race with precisely the same area on the page without the page looking like total crap. I think it worked out pretty well.
Here’s a work-in-progress for a feature on the importance of vitamin D. It needs something, but I can’t put my finger on what.
I was lucky enough to be scheduled to do the front page last night after the bailout disaster.
