week 9

From this month, our PR person proposes a project.

The purpose is to increase the interaction between the readers, customer and the newspaper.

We will organize an activity every month and open to the readers to participate.

This way, our customer will have chance to promote their business directly to the reader, and the reader will have direct information from our customer.

I think it is a good idea to promote our newspaper and our customer's business as well. Really impressive work!!

Week 8

Our newspaper has being published for about one and a half year, and we are going to remodel our website. Today our IT person came to the office and we had a talk.

I will be the one design the website layout and he will take care of the coding part.

I am really excited because this website is going to be popular if we well promote it through our newspaper.

For inspiration, I visit many websites. TW Yahoo is my favorite because it is full of information, however it is not complicated and messy. User friendly and clear navigation is the key.

Week 6 & 7

After newspaper has been released to the public, I am usually the least busy person in the group.

What I usually do at this time is looking for inspiration for the next layout design.

Because we are free newspaper, our income mostly comes from advertising.

So besides art editor, I am also sales.

My boss was working for World Journal for 26 years and is very experienced.

He shows me how to deal with customer and how to communicate with them.

We have to treat ourselves as helper who tries to help customer's business.

Also, we are business consultant who is able to give customer advice how to run their business.

We are looking for win-win relationship.

By doing sales, I have chance to know different kind of business including restaurant, dentist, real estate, insurance...etc. It is good for me because the experience help me on communication and skill of dealing different people and situation.

At the beginning, it is hard for me to talk to a stranger and convince him to put advertise on our newspaper. Practice really helps me on build up confidence. The trick is that the better I know our product, the better the presentation will perform.

Week 5

Since we are bi-weekly newspaper, the newspaper is printed every other week.

This week is the printing week, which means I will be crazy busy.

I have to do the final editing and make sure that everything goes right.

Even a picture is not light enough, or a word spelling wrong will not be acceptable.

Sometimes layout design is ready to print, a update news just suddenly comes out and the whole layout design has to be re-adjusted.

One thing I like in this critical time is that I get a chance to talk to the person who works at printing place. Usually printing a proven newspaper takes 40 minutes and I have nothing to do but wait until it is done. While waiting, I talk to Louise who is the one taking care of our newspaper every time. He is experienced at printing industry, and I usually learn something from him.

He told me how they put different page in printing order, and how they bind the pages all together which is based on the even or odd number.

This is like a break time during this busy period, and I enjoy it.