Charles Apple | American Copy Editors Society

Seems like Ryan Huddle and the gang at the Victoria Advocate have become a weekly fixture here in the blog. They seem to come up with something interesting, creative or just flat-out wacky for their Friday M3 entertainment tab.

This week, the story is best told as a narrative. So please take it away, Ryan…

OK. So, the M3 staff was sitting around on Tuesday in our weekly planning meeting and we were recapping this weeks issue to make sure we had everything planned out. The plan was to do an M3 on the 3 movies coming out this week: The Expendables, Scott Pilgram vs. the World, and Eat Pray Love.

Everything was going fine until we started joking around about how cool it would be to get an interview with an actor. Well, it turns out that Steve Austin who is in the Expendables is actually from Edna, Texas.

Well, you could imagine our excitement at that one. We don’t have a lot of celebrities around these parts (It’s funnier if you say that last part in a Texas draw). Aprill [Brandon; the usual M3 writer and Ryan's wife] was busy covering other events so she could not try to contact him so J.R. Oretega stepped up and ran with the story.

Tuesday afternoon: Nothing, Wednesday morning: Nothing.

Wednesday afternoon, J.R. got ahold of Steve’s Mom — That’s right, we called the mans mother. She was very sweet and said she would call him and see about getting us an interview with him. You have to love mothers. No one can ever say no their mother.

Shortly, Steve called and we got the interview. And not only did J.R. write the story but was also able to put together a short multi-media package for our website.

Now we had to decide if we want it on A1 or in the M3. M3 won.

Problem was, I had already started designing the pages I had Scott Pilgrim on the front and was working on the double truck when I got the news. So goodbye, old pages and hello, starting completely over. But I think it was all worth it.

And that is the reason I love this business so much. We get an idea and we go after it, everyone helps everyone else out and does the best they can to get the job done.

And I have to tell you: When you find out you have to scrap everything and you got and start over, the adrenaline starts pumping and all I could think of was Am I going to get this done? and Will it be good enough? I really didn’t want to make Mr. Austin mad.

Here is the resulting Steve Austin cover of today’s M3. Not bad at all for a last-minute revise:

Here’s the inside spread — I presume this ran sideways — containing the Steve Austin interview (click for a readable version):

Here is the inside page Ryan put together for the Scott Pilgram vs. the World movie (Click for a larger view):

And here is the piece Aprill wrote and posed for regarding the Eat Pray Love movie (Again, click for a readable version):

While he was at it, Ryan also told us about a recent online column by Aprill in which she addressed the problem of online commenting and the lack of civility with those comments. Read that piece here.

Just last week, we were admiring Aprill’s new tattoo and the big features package Ryan and his folks built around her first-person experiences.

Average daily circulation for the Advocate is 33,549.