Charles Apple | American Copy Editors Society

My teaching expedition this week to Harrisburg, Pa. — at the Patriot-News, circulation 77,598 — has coincided with my good friend Meg Lavey‘s first few days designing A1.

Megan, you might recall, is a talented writer, editor and designer. Her career took her from the Selma (Ala.) Times-Journal to the Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier to the Lewiston, Maine, Sun Journal to the (Tucson) Arizona Daily Star.

She left the newspaper business, worked in a bank for a while and began blogging for an Apple computer news web site. Megs reentered print journalism 22 months later when she was hired in June as a designer for the Patriot News.

She designed A1 earlier this week but then flew solo Thursday night. After a day of teaching maps and graphics and two long visual journalism lectures, I sat in on Megan’s pod as she worked up an interesting centerpiece for Friday’s front.

The lead story Friday was a fun one involving political personalities and, frankly, gossip. The three-person board of commissioners in one of the counties of the metro area here are squabbling — squabbling to the point of making it tougher to govern, perhaps. The challenge was to find a fun way to illustrate this feud.

Megan proposed back on Wednesday that we build one of those cute little relationship charts using mug shots and snappy little lines of text. We’ve all seen these kinds of charts illustrating the relationships on TV shows like the Sopranos and Real Life and Lost.

This one wouldn’t be nearly as complicated. But it wouldn’t need to be. On page one, we probably wouldn’t want it to be.

The paper here is very hungry to experiment with alternative story forms and presentation on A1, so Megan was given the go-ahead by managing editor Cate Barron.

Meg spoke with the reporter Wednesday night to get a feel for how the story was going to be written. she came to work Thursday armed with sketches and ideas on how to start:

Granted, A1 design here isn’t the same as it is nearly anywhere else. The custom here is to build most lead packages into a four- or four-and-a-half-column hole on the left side of the page, where it will then be partially obscured by the paper’s daily SPADEA:

And yes, I just love the SPADEA. It’s a great idea executed very well by the Patriot-News. Perhaps I can post more photos later. But note how the baby story appears above the fold in its entirety. That’s Meg’s centerpiece barely peeking out from beneath the SPADEA.

So anyway, Megs began laying elements into her page via Adobe InDesign. My contribution to the package was to suggest round — rather than square — mugs and white arrows that would be visible but not pop too quickly off the page.

Meg’s time was spent crafting the text between the three mug shots to try to explain the complicated personalities involved.

At one point, frustrated that our “V” arrangement wasn’t working well with our proposed text wraps, Meg turned the entire arrangement on its ear, placing the point of her “V” on the left. Suddenly, the text fell into place and her solution was obvious.

Throughout the evening, assistant managing editor for operations Skip Wachter kept a careful eye on Meg, her page and the clock, taking on the more menial tasks and keeping her free to experiment with the layout of her lead package.

When Meg was done with the page and everything was edited and vetted, the InDesign page is saved and then placed into the Harris publishing system. That page, in turn, is sent to the platemaking department, a couple hundred yards away across the parking lot.

Here was the result (click for a larger view):

It is a worthy step in the paper’s march toward livening up its presentation. And it was also a blast to sit in with my good friend on her first night back in the driver’s seat.

In her spare time, Meg had to show off her wedding ring. It’s surprising she can type at all with that enormous boulder chained to her finger:

Megan, of course, was married four months ago. Her husband — an astrophysicist from Liverpool — came to the U.S. to get her settled into her new home in Mechanicsburg, Pa., but then returned to England a few days ago. I missed him by that much.

I’ve been so busy this week that I’ve not had much time left over to blog. I’ll try to get you all caught up soon.

There are two more days left to my five-day mission here. I’ll return home Monday.