Learning how to do layout after all

Making a page look pretty was sort of fun after a while...

Upon learning I was tipping my toes into the chilly pool of journalism, the father of a very good friend of mine (also the dad of my first girlfriend), had this advice.

“Learn to play the piano, John. Everything. Not just stories. Take photos, learn layout, everything. Learn how to do it all.”

At that point, I wanted to do one thing — write. I could take photos, I guess but laying out a page, uh, well, I sorta did that kind of thing with my Rivier College newspaper, The Perspective but…

So I started off, writing my fool head off (not unlike what I’ve been doing with Substack, though better punctuation now) and eight months in, I was named Sports Editor of the Nashua Telegraph and put on salary which meant I could work as many hours as I wanted. (Nice of them, wasn’t it?) It also meant I had TO DO THE PAGES.

This was a pretty cool layout (I thought) after I visited The Boxing Hall of Fame.

So what that meant in those days was every morning (we were an afternoon paper) you’d get two, three, four sheets of paper with ads stacked up on the bottoms of each of them and your job was to fill the remaining space with material, stories, photos, graphs, charts, standings, whatever fit. That meant:

• Choosing the stories (what were you going to run, to feature?)

• Editing the stories (making sure they made sense, look for typos, mistakes)

• Writing the headlines (Trying to write a tease to induce you to read the story)

• Laying it out. Choosing pictures, graphs, etc. to fill up the open space.

As the Sports Editor, it was my call as to what would go where. Or should have been. And this is where I ran into trouble. The newspaper’s publisher at the time, a stuck-up, pretend Brahmin named J. Herman Pouliot, was a member of the Nashua Country Club and as he wanted to get in good with the pro there and especially the ladies at the club, he wanted a pronounced emphasis on Nashua Country Club golf.

Since I didn’t play golf or give two monkeys about how the ladies at the Club were playing or who won the member-member, shootouts or whatever stupid name they gave their tournaments, I tended to put their “releases” towards the back of the section, as far back, generally, as I could, since I thought most readers — who I should have been aiming for — were interested in the Red Sox or Patriots or the local high school sports, not the damn Country Club.

So when I did a Page One (of Sports) layout like this, of Nashua High School facing Manchester Memorial for the Class L Basketball Championship, you’d have thought the publisher would have come running up the stairs, saying, “Hey, that’s fantastic that you’re promoting our local high school kids — future readers — like you are! That’s incredible! No other newspaper in the state gives high school kids this kind of ink. Fantastic.”

As you might have guessed from my tone, that did not happen. In fact, once I got yelled at — not by him but our runty Assistant Manager Editor for playing the Major League All-Star Game at the top of the sports page instead of some women’s member-member tournament at the Nashua Country Club. I shouldn’t have been but I was so shocked by what seemed such a stupid request I didn’t even argue back (not like me.) I laughed, which was not the response he was looking for.

Over time — as I hope the layouts show — I got the hang of it and actually came to enjoy it. At the Middlesex News, I actually worked with a really bright lady who was a designer and wanted every layout to have a dogleg, in other words, a “L” in type and to fit the entire page together that way. I was never a huge puzzle guy — life is puzzling enough — but I got the hang of it and she told me I was becoming a pretty clever page designer. So you CAN learn things you don’t particularly want to.

And all that layout practice came in handy when, in my last job (beside Substack) I ran the Journalism Department at Gadsden County High School and my little school newspaper, The Gadsden County Gazette, actually won First Place IN THE NATION the last two years I was at the school. I suspect the student writing, their crackerjack ideas and creative ideas did the trick. But it might have been the layout!