BYU NewsNet - Peering Past the Print of Paper Production

Reporters make The Daily Universe sound good, but copy editors, Web designers, photographers and advertisers make it look even better.

The actual writing of the stories is only one part of The Daily Universe. It requires much more to produce an award-winning paper.

The Daily Universe is funded exclusively by the ads found in its pages.

The advertising department is staffed by 10 ad representatives who prospect for new clients, sell newspaper space and design and place ads.

"It's a lot of work to balance advertising with school," said Karin Jones, an advertising representative from Summit, NJ. "It's real clients and a real job. No one's babysitting you."

Photographers also add color to The Daily Universe's pages by enhancing and illustrating stories.

The biggest challenge for Daily Universe photographers is trying to get a unique photo from events that happen regularly and are all similar, such as weekly devotionals, said Christine Armbruster, 20, of San Antonio, Texas.

"Photojournalism is a different style of photography," Armbruster said. "It ties everything together. You have to do portraiture and fine art, sports and low-light and all sorts of stuff. It makes you well rounded and exposes you to everything."

After most students have gone home, copy editors come in to edit, design and layout each page.

Every night the copy editor in charge of laying out the front page changes, giving the five designers of The Daily Universe a chance to test their skills with a page completely devoid of ads.

Sometimes, the designers will put their initials on the corner of a front page they are particularly proud of, so people can tell who designed the page the night before.

"People might think that designing a paper is easy, but it's always fun for me to see people sit down and try to design a page on their own, because it's actually really complicated," copy editor Jackie Hicken said. "While students might open the paper and think, 'I can do better,' the truth is, they probably can't. Ad stacks, story lengths, pull-quotes, bylines, cutlines, headlines, decks, info boxes and graphics all present challenges, so putting together a page is like putting together a puzzle with no answer key."

Finally, Web editors are responsible for putting The Daily Universe online at NewsNet by 10 a.m. each day.

This involves more editing to make sure what is read by anyone in the world is correct. The skills required are many and varied.

"Some of us know HTML, podcasting, video editing, et cetera," Web editor Robin Broberg said. "Our job is really fun because we get to decide how to make the stories more interactive."

Web editor Julian Cavazos said shooting videos and working with multimedia software is fun, but that it's not necessarily a 1-5 p.m. job.

"You work when events are happening," Cavazos said.

Communications Professor Ed Carter said today's journalism is more demanding than ever before.

"The reality of today's media is that you're not confined to one medium," Carter said. "They want audio, video, photo, and writing - multi-tasking journalists. We've responded by exposing journalists to all sides and converging."