Last week I had possibly the craziest week of my life. I was working with some other students on my course to create a 16 page tabloid newspaper to promote Pits n Pots, a local politics website in Stoke-on-Trent.
It all started when Charlie Burgess of The Journalism Foundation came in to do one our lectures. At the end, he said he had an opportunity for us to create this newspaper and anyone who was interested should come along to a meeting after the lecture.
Knowing how insanely busy my life is at the moment with Wannabe Hacks, dissertation work, other uni work and trying to have something of a social life, I decided to go along to the meeting and offer to design a page or two and that would be that. It would look good on my CV without me having to do too much or it taking up too much of my time. Things never go quite as you expect though, and by the end of the meeting I’d become the chief sub editor. I don’t think I’ll ever know quite how that happened.
Life as a sub was absolutely mental. It was very stressful and I feel like I spent most of the week wanting to strangle reporters. This wasn’t helped by the fact that our strong team of about 15 fell to a team of four for most of the week.
I spent hours making decisions on font styles and sizes, a colour theme and generally what we wanted to make the paper look like. And then I spent hours going through pages that other people had created making sure they had followed the style.
When we eventually got copy in I had to trawl through it, correct any grammar or spelling mistakes and make sure nothing we said would get us into legal trouble. And then I had to cut it down to make it fit into the hole we had on the page.
And then came the real challenge. I had to make sure we didn’t have any widows or orphans within the text. This is where you have a paragraph that ends on the first line of a column or starts on the last line of a column. Anyone who has ever done any form of subbing will tell you what a nightmare this can be. Especially when to get rid of one widow or orphan causes you to create two more. There is genuinely no joy that comes close to matching the joy of getting all the copy to fit into the page properly.
One of my least favourite things about being a sub was writing headlines. Trying to find something that is witty and intelligent but also tells the story in a few words and fits into the gap you have at the top of the story is no mean feat.
So, after a week as a chief sub, I have a new found respect for all subs everywhere. I think they do an amazing job that’s definitely not easy to do. In fact, it’s bloody hard. So, to subs everywhere, I doff my cap.
Oh, and in case you’re interested, here’s the front page from the newspaper. Let me know what you think on twitter @wannabehacks
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