Fall 2019: Production and Design at the Yale Daily News

At Yale, working for the YDN is not an activity — it is a lifestyle. Our passionate, meticulous, tireless managing editors are at production at least 40 hours a week (a full-time job commitment!) while desk editors linger in the building long past their four-hour nightly shifts to finish up homework and engage in heated debates over the latest controversy in journalism. You'll find signs of life at 202 York St. at all hours, from our staff running in before sunrise to distribute papers, to (alas) Production and Design editors staying past 4 a.m. to ensure the safe delivery of PDF's to our printer in Hartford. And since we're eponymously a daily paper, no editor can ever drop the ball.

Our dedication shows: last year, we were announced "Best All-Around Daily Student Newspaper" by the Society of Professional Journalists!

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Our very first production night as editors on the Managing Board of 2021. We sent our 12-page paper to print at 1:25 a.m., a record in YDN's history of first nights! I'm in a yellow sweater in the back. The girl in the beige hoodie on the right is our amazing Editor-in-Chief, Sammy Westfall!

I'm a Production and Design editor on the Yale Daily News Managing Board of 2021. P&D is responsible for producing daily spreads for our different sections: A-section (the daily paper), WKND (the creative insert we publish Fridays), and Magazine (our bimonthly foray into long-form journalism). We use software such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Bridge, and InCopy, and rely on a central management system called vjoon K4.

We are also tasked with creating special issues such as weekly 6-page "Week in Review" issues published on Saturdays and sold to alumni, an annual 10-page issue for the Harvard-Yale football game, two 60-page issues for Commencement and incoming first-years, and an 8-page issue publishing work from our Summer Journalism Program for high school students.

Since this year there are six P&D editors (compared to last year's nine), we each come in about 25 hours a week, divided into one "lead" A-section shift where we oversee the full production night and multiple "support" shifts for A-section and other categories.

I personally oversee A-section, Weekend, and special issue production. I was one of twelve YDN staffers to stay two weeks past finals period to organize, manage, and design a 60-page Commencement issue.

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As the P&D staffer managing the commencement issue, I was also in charge of creating the covers for our four sections. I decided to photograph arrangements of items from various sectors of a Yalie's life, which turned out to be both visually successful and a nostalgic throwback of a senior's college experience: acapella groups, first-year orientation programs, local restaurants, sports victories... with a cameo from my own student ID!

Creating 60 pages of content in 14 days involves amazing quantities of preparation. Our typical workflow for every single article includes content planning, writing, desk editing, fact-checking, editing from management, copy-editing, layout, proofing, and printing.

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A typical night of workflow for A-section. As you can see, each article passes through many hands and phases before we declare it ready for the public eye.

The P&D desk is unique in that, barring management, we are really the only desk that interacts with every other desk at the YDN. Articles, photographs, illustrations, graphics, corrections, ads, our Youtube videos, our website, our social media... we see it all!

We on P&D sometimes joke that P&D drives the YDN's content. This is because, as the last step of production, we are often called upon to fill space when an article has to be pushed or dropped, leaving us with not enough content for the next day. In that case, we work under some pretty hefty time pressure to produce graphics from data handed to us from desk editors using Adobe Illustrator.

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A few graphics I've made for various sections.
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As we progress to a more digital age of journalism, the YDN is committed to incorporating more multimedia storytelling. I made these graphics to accompany our story on this year's mayoral race in New Haven.

Outside of production, I also co-directed this summer's Summer Journalism Program, which is a weeklong crash course on journalism for local high school students hosted at our production building the week before fall term begins. After planning and executing a core curriculum of story angle, sourcing, writing, structuring, fact-checking, copy-editing, photography, and production skills, we paired students to write articles for an 8-page paper, which I created and sent to them the day after the program ended.

The program raised over $8,000 for the YDN's yearly operating budget thanks to the intensive outreach to local high schools we put into play this year. We were also responsible for reading, organizing, and responding to student applications as well as planning and directing all program activities.

To supplement each day's lessons, we reached out and got renowned YDN alum (including Michael Barbaro, host of The New York Times podcast The Daily, Max Abelson, Wall Street reporter for Bloomberg, and Caroline Chen, health care investigative reporter for ProPublica) to host a daily speaker series.

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One of a few posters I made to promote SJP. We had different marketing campaigns for in-state versus out-of-state students. We stayed in close communication with English, journalism, and communications teachers from over 20 schools, mostly centered in Connecticut.

My most recent project at the YDN was planning, managing, and making a 10-page issue for the Harvard-Yale football game with our sports editors. Thanks to our careful workflow planning and our consideration of limited human resources (we published this Friday, meaning Thursday night we had to produce 32 pages for A-section, Weekend and this issue), we were able to crank this issue out in less than seven hours.

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The cover and table of contents I made for our Game issue.

I love both design and management aspects of creating full issues, and I truly enjoy the (sometimes tedious) tasks of copy-editing and proofing pages. As I prepare more special issues with interesting parameters, I learn more about the unique processes of each desk. I am passionate about optimizing not just mine but every desk's workflow so that each night's production can grow more efficient, without ever sacrificing the quality of our content or design.

Fall 2020: Rethinking "Digital" at the Yale Daily News

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our existing workflows could not continue to exist. Myself, along with my fellow Production & Design Editors, Management, and members of our Tech team, oversaw our transition to a functional remote model, complete with collaborative communication channels to replace the irreplaceable vibe of 202 York St.

I personally oversaw our transition from K4, a content management system by Dutch company vjoon, to a hybrid model of Google Suite, an Amazon Web Server, Slack, and shared Indesign templates, paragraph styles, and export settings, just to tide us over the remaining period of our editorship. During that time period, I realized a number of changes the YDN needed to make to keep up with our equivalents at other colleges, as well as to elevate our coverage to more professional standards.

In particular, upon moving to a daily online and weekly print paper model to conserve finances, we lost a great deal of our publication strength, relying on an old, messy website codebase for our only daily content platform, as well as losing our regular touchpoint with our demographic — our Yale campus distribution sites. We needed to make rapid and vast improvement to our digital channels (web, social media, mobile app) in order to keep our readership and maintain our existing campus presence. Not to mention, our communication channels which had tided us over the last months of my old editorship would not last what might be another semester or even another year, especially to facilitate the kind of cross-desk multimedia projects we were envisioning.

Myself, along with a few other outgoing board members, formed the inaugural Digital Desk in response to these areas of obvious improvement. We set together some goals for our desk's 2020-21 projects:

  • Helping desk editors set up digital workflow and communication systems
  • Transforming our web style through adding inline and interactive content
  • Curating creative multimedia content specific to our social media channels for greater audience engagement
  • Launching the Yale Daily News app as a new touchpoint for digital News readers
  • Investigating alternate content presentation on the newsletter
  • Investing time into understanding our readership’s user experience to improve digital interfaces
  • Collaborating with the Publisher to monetize digital content

I can't wait to launch these projects with my fellow editors, since, with talent from Photo, Video, Podcast, Design, Data, and newsroom desks, we'll be able to plan, timeline, oversee, and delegate many long-form and multimedia journalism pieces that the YDN desperately needs. With new tools such as Adobe Spark, Adobe XD, Buffer social media CMS, Wordpress, Microsoft Teams, and Trello at our fingertips, our team is ready to tackle the multimedia challenges that the YDN has been too overloaded to devote time to. And, as returning editors, we'll be able to advise incoming editors on how to navigate these peculiar journalistic times and guide tough ethical and operational decisions.

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Some of the Instagram posts from our rebrand. These snippets from our daily paper rewarded us with 5x engagement and 5000 new followers in just a few months.