O
generations yet to come! I write to you from a time when the Worldcon
was yet young and Helsinki was but a city on the edge of the world,
one that scarcely dreamed of its destiny to serve as beating heart of
a vast and feared empire.
In
those days of 2017 we learned many things, and it is my hope that
these words will inspire you new generations as you continue the
grand & sacred traditions laid down in these rough days of
dragons and steel.
Preparations
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Plan for two issues a day most days.
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Do special issues for the Hugos and Masquerade on top of this.
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Budget for 1,000 copies per issue.
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Find places where people are likely to be to distribute the newsletter; near the entrance, at the Info Desk and in the Fan Lounge are good.
Planning for the Worldcon 75 (W75)
newsletter began in earnest with the May 2017 staff weekend, three
and a half months before the Worldcon. I volunteered as co-editor of
the newsletter alongside Curtis Jefferson, with production to fall
under the Design department run by M. Pietikäinen (area head) and
Santeri Vidal (area deputy head). Jefferson was unable to attend W75
and bowed out of the Newsletter team. Vidal was the newsletter’s
primary point of contact during both planning and W75 itself.
I had no previous experience
running a Con newsletter. I had seen the newsletters at several Cons
before, including at Worldcons in Glasgow (2005), Anaheim (2006) and
London (2014). I also had some experience with journalistic writing
in my capacities as a Wikinews journalist in 2008-9, as press liaison
for Occupy Cardiff in 2011 and producing material for the Socialist
Party of England & Wales’ media presence in 2009-2014. Lastly,
as a teacher holding a PGCE I had received training in preparing
learning materials for students who might have undiagnosed learning
disabilities.
During the staff weekend, we
determined the mission of the newsletter should be to “inform and
entertain” with conveying information taking the highest priority.
Over the course of the summer we refined this vision into a sense of
what items should be given priority due to limited space. We quickly
determined that the highest priority would, generally, be for
important announcements affecting the running of the Con itself, such
as program changes & accessibility information; that second
priority would go to social events & similar events announced
beforehand, such as parties; and that the lowest priority would go to
“gossip” i.e. authors getting drunk at parties.
We decided a general plan of
printing all newsletters in black & white with the exception of
the special Masquerade issue; that the first and last days of W75
would have one regular issue, and other days would see two regular
issues; and that we would produce special Hugo Awards and Masquerade
issues. The total run was 11 issues: Wednesdsay, Thursday AM,
Thursday PM, Friday AM, Friday PM, Hugo Awards, Saturday AM, Saturday
PM, Masquerade and Sunday, with a special Dead Dog Party issue
produced in free time with limited resources on Sunday. Our target
wordcount for each issue was 900-1000 words, with space for one
photograph per issue. We estimated 1000 copies of each issue should
be produced and ordered paper before the convention to match this
amount plus a 50% margin for emergencies.
We planned a series of points for
distribution of Painopiste based on pre-convention maps of the
site. Most copies were to be delivered to the Information Desk and
the Fan Lounge, with some going to the Volunteer Lounge. Our logic
was driven in particular by making sure visitors saw the newsletter
as soon as they arrived at the Con through the main entrance.
Layout
& Accessibility
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Use fonts that are easy to read and paper that’s easy to read on.
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Make the design as accessible to a wide range of readers as possible.
A central feature in the
preparation of the newsletter was two parallel concerns: we resolved
to make the W75 newsletter as accessible to fans with dyslexia &
other reading issues as possible; and we resolved to make the
newsletter visually impressive and professional-looking.
The
Design AH’s experience with several years of Finncons had led to
the emergence of a Finncon “house style,” including preferred
typefaces & colors, through which Design sought to present a
unified visual identity for W75. Consequently Design was able to
provide the newsletter with an adaptable, minimalist & clear
template design including a
custom masthead and footer. This
template was produced using Adobe Indesign and some custom graphics.
For
my part, I concentrated on the question of accessibility. Early in
this process, I noted that while W75 had agreed to follow the SWFA’s
document “Accessibility Checklist for SFWA Spaces”
(http://www.sfwa.org/other-resources/public-relations/accessibility-checklist-for-sfwa-spaces/),
that document contained no discussion on the question of readability.
Discussions between myself, the Design AH, the Design DH, and the
Member Services DH Vanessa May, resulted in a number of
recommendations which were incorporated into the final W75
newsletter. These recommendations were drawn from a combination of
personal experience, systematic reviews in academic literature on
readability, the British
Dyslexia Association’s Dyslexia Style Guide
(http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/common/ckeditor/filemanager/userfiles/About_Us/policies/Dyslexia_Style_Guide.pdf),
and the UK National Union of Students’ Disabled Students’
Campaign’s guidance on accessible printed materials.
Firstly,
we agreed to produce all issues as printed in black ink on
pastel-colored paper apart from the Masquerade Issue. The reason for
this decision was that people with some forms of dyslexia experience
“dazzle” when reading black
text on bright white paper; in our venue, the lighting was primarily
fluorescent, which would have made this situation worse. We also
noted that using different-colored paper would make different issues
easy to distinguish. The colors we used were: Lilac, Light Green,
Salmon, Pink and Light Blue. Reflective
or “neon” colors were particularly to
be avoided as they would have
made the dazzle problem worse.
We avoided using We used white paper for the Masquerade issue on the
basis that this issue would be dominated not by text but by
full-color photographs.
We also decided to avoid using
shaded or half-tone text boxes, and instead to mark text boxes with
black-and-white borders. This recommendation was drawn from the NUS
style guidelines and from common practice. This recommendation was
not followed in the Wednesday or Hugo Awards issues of the newsletter
due to miscommunication; we received no complaints.
The
question of what typeface to use was a point of contention among the
design team. The central issue was: while certain fonts are
recommended or deprecated based on their accessibility, the existence
of W75’s established visual identity meant using a new typeface
would require breaking this visual identity. At the recommendation of
the Member Services AH we agreed to use Garamond
12 point as the body text for the newsletter, but all headlines
bylines
& footers were printed in
W75’s house style. This was, in
my estimation, a reasonable
compromise which did not
sacrifice readability.
One
area where we decided to prioritize design considerations was the use
of full justification & hyphens in the layout of the newsletter’s
body text. Due to the extremely limited space constraints we found
ourselves under for the Wednesday and Thursday AM issues, hyphenation
was quickly found to be a necessity. Meanwhile, left-justification
created visual anomalies in the alignment of body text columns and
therefore full justification was chosen as the “lesser evil.”
The
question of italicization, underlining and boldface arose frequently.
The Worldcon newsletter will, in general, often have to discuss books
or other works whose titles are generally italicized in most style
guidelines. Meanwhile, most guidance for dyslexic readers deprecates
the use of italic text. We settled on a convention of using
underlining for titles and block quotes, and boldface for e-mail
addresses and paragraph titles, in the absence of consistent,
definitive guidance one way or another from the dyslexic community.
We
also made the editorial decision to avoid special choices in
vocabulary. This was a difficult judgement call. On the one hand,
Worldcon is a highly internationalized event and many visitors may
not be highly proficient in reading English. On the other, as a
primarily literary & intellectual event, a higher baseline level
of literacy could be assumed. Lastly, re-writing all articles in
simple English would have considerably slowed down the editorial
process and affected the flavor of the newsletter’s text,
particularly that submitted by members outside the staff. While we
did not simplify Painopiste’s vocabulary,
we did make efforts to simplify long or difficult sentences where
necessary.
Production
process
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Have an editor & a layout person work side-by-side.
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Set up many ways to get stories beforehand, and check them all. A Newsletter e-mail addres is really good
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Laying out & printing each issue can take up to 4 hours.
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The most important things are program updates & announcements. Put in parties, con news & gossip if you have space.
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Be smart about using your printers--if they break you have no newsletter!
Issues
of Painopiste were
generally produced with by a team of two: an editor in charge of
compiling and producing text and images, and a layout person
proficient in the use of Adobe Indesign and other Adobe design suite
applications. Layout was carried out on a Macintosh with a large
color monitor running Indesign.
Before W75, we decided a pattern
of deadlines for each issue: generally we would seek to close content
for the AM issue at 10pm the night before publication, and content
for the PM issue at 10am the day of publication. This rhythm proved
hard to maintain in practice and while we had a considerable excess
of material for the Wednesday and Thurday AM issues, for subsequent
issues we often found we were able to accommodate submissions up to
the moment we started layout.
We had initially planned the
process of layout & printing would take about two hours per
issue. In practice, layout took two hours per issue, and printing
took a further two hours.
Material
for each issue was assembled from seven sources. The bulk of material
was submitted through the public e-mail address for the newsletter,
newsletter@worldcon.fi;
this was configured so as to forward all messages to a “Conzine”
subgroup on the Basecamp platform W75 used for staff communication. A
thread was also established daily on Basecamp for staff to post
newsletter items, but this saw far less use.
A
small amount of material was also gleaned from the Slack channels
established by W75 for open discussion & questions from members.
Two
articles for the newsletter were submitted as handwritten letters and
transcribed into a Word document.
Some
material, notably the Hugo Awards information, was provided to
Newsletter directly in the form of Microsoft Word documents via USB
flash drive.
Most
photographs were compiled by W75’s photography team and posted by
the official photographer, Henry Söderlund, who processed the photos
and posted them in a Google Photos folder. All photographs included
photographer credits and Painopiste
was assured proper permissions were in place for us to use them. One
photograph, that of Hugo winner N. K. Jemisin, was taken from a
Wikipedia article on the author, and we made sure the photograph was
appropriately licensed, in this case as CC-BY-SA.
The
final source of content was the editor himself, i.e.
me. On a few occassions I was
able to write editorials or
other short pieces to fill out space. This content, however, received
the lowest priority and was often removed to make way for
fan-submitted materials. Much
of the planned filler, e.g. humorous “learn Finnish” inserts, was
never used.
From
Basecamp and the other sources, material was copied & pasted into
a Google Document for editing & allocation. Submissions were
grouped into a small number of categories: News, Announcements,
Events, Parties and Program Changes.
Announcements
and Program Changes were the most important. Announcements in
particular was the venue for notices from Access and Ops and updates
on the space situation, which became acute at W75 due to unexpectedly
high demand; Program Changes meanwhile, which were provided dutifully
by the Program AH, were of particular importance given the space
situation’s necessitization of last-minute room alterations.News,
ironically, was a lower-priority category. This section generally
included a photograph and reported on events which had already taken
place. Parties was a lower-priority item as all parties run as part
of W75 were also announced on the W75 website; Events was reserved
for fan-run happenings that were not part of W75’s official
program.
One
frequent submission which we never quite figured out what to do with
was the WSFS business reports. These reports, by Kevin Standlee, were
always thorough but also usually exceeded 200 words in length. Often
they were cut down to make room for items judged to be of higher
priority.
Layout
often involved last-minute cutting or re-writing of articles for
length or clarity. We were fortunate that submitters almost always
included key information in articles, so we as editors didn’t have
to request further information or seek it out ourselves. The editor &
layout person worked side-by-side, with the editor having final say
and taking responsibility for decisions.
When
the layout process was complete, a copy of the newsletter was
published to PDF format and this PDF was circulated by the chairs for
final approval and comments; this usually took about 15 minutes, and
we operated to the standard that any chair could speak for the
chairs’ team in approving the newsletter. Once approval was
received, we immediately began printing.
Our
printing suite consisted of, initially, three small printers (one
color, two black-and-white), printing double-sided on A4. This suite
was based in the press room. However, due to high demand--the press
room produced some 28,000 pages on the first three days of W75, three
times the number expected beforehand--mechanical issues & toner
shortages quickly began to plague the newsletter and slow down the
production cycle considerably. In particular, duplex printing, where
the printer prints both sides of the paper in a single cycle,
resulted in frequent jams and lost time. From issue 7 onwards, we
began printing single-sided, 500 copies at a time; then putting those
500 copies back in the printer to print the other side of the
newsletter. By the final day of W75 we were down to one functional
printer.
Before
W75, we considered producing the newsletter by bulk printing, which
would have been much faster, but this was determined to be
prohibitively expensive at 0.20€/copy.
Our
initial plan for distribution of Painopiste
was to give finished copies to Turva, W75’s ops & security
team, and they would have assigned gophers to take copies to the
designated locations. In practice, especially given proximity of the
press room to the Information Desk, the Design team ended up
distributing the newsletter ourselves.
Tone,
Editorial Freedom & Editorial Voice
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The newsletter will sound more sincere if it speaks with your voice. Trust your judgement.
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Use jokes but don’t let them get in the way of the most important information.
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If it feels right to you, print it, but be ready to back it up.
As
editor the biggest personal choices I faced in producing Painopiste
were about the tone & attitude the newsletter presented to the
world. I decided early on that Painopiste’s content
would be personal, and that my own individuality would be present in
the newsletter’s tone and editorial attitudes. From my first day as
editor, I insisted on considerable editorial freedom in production
while agreeing the chairs would get final approval on content.
While
my background is not Finnish, my own sense of humor tends to align
with what is often considered Finland’s national character in
jokes: deadpan, grim and subtle. Thus, I avoided “joke” articles
entirely, instead focusing on adding flavor in headlines, very short
introductions to articles, or individual sentences. Moreover I
decided that certain subjects such as access or ops matters should be
conveyed as straightforwardly as possible, both for reasons of
respect and to be inclusive to new members not necessarily accustomed
to the “con culture” of in-jokes. The
parody newsletter Offpiste,
produced by some fans from Britain and the Netherlands, complained,
“all the jokes ave been surgically excised from the official
newsletter.” We retort: the jokes were there, they were simply too
subtle for Offpiste’s
team to notice. We apologize for the subtlety.
Moreover I would have been unable
to deny the intrinsically political character of the convention;
pretending to be neutral is, in my opinion, a far worse
politicization of published content than presenting one’s own
standpoint and being able to defend it.
Thus, when the 2017 Hugo Awards
were won by women authors in the majority of categories, with women
of color winning many of the most prominent awards, it was entirely
appropriate to take a journalistic tone in the Hugo special issue
highlighting this fact, and to include a highly-politicized quotation
from the Best Novel winner, N. K. Jemisin, where she discusses the
impact of racist attitudes toward black authors. Moreover, to the
best of my ability to tell, an attitude in favor of diversity and
inclusiveness is entirely in line with the majority of W75
members--or else the Hugo Awards’ results would have gone very
differently.
Taking
such stances caused no significant backlash until after the
publication of issue 8, the final regular issue. Near the end of W75,
Finnish railway VR’s workers announced a strike on the Monday and
Tuesday following the convention in protest against government plans
to privatize the state railway system. Issue 8 included a message of
support for the VR Railway Strike from a member of W75 and the
announcement of the circulation of a petition by myself so more
members of W75 could show support for the strike. This material was
approved by the W75 committee without any objection. Nonetheless, one
leading member of WSFS raised vocal objections after the fact to the
content of issue 8, claiming the material “violated the WSFS
constitution” and that I as editor was giving a platform to
“special interest groups.”
This
stance against issue 8’s announcement was rightly judged to be
absurd. Firstly, long-established fans should remember to be
sensitive to the cultures of Worldcon’s host countries--some
three-fourths of Finns are union members, and an overwhelming
majority oppose the government’s plans which provoked the VR
strike. Secondly, there exists a broad consensus among the fan
community that some “special interest groups,” particularly those
facing special oppression, do indeed deserve promotion through W75;
no objection was raised whatsoever for example to Geek Girls Finland
(Nörttitytöt) announcing their events and their political message
of gender equality in the newsletter in three separate issues.
Someone
might try to argue the converse: what if some “alt-right” special
interest group, the infamous Puppies of many bitter flavors for
example, had prepared some announcement? Would I have run it? No, I
would not, and I would have vehemently resisted any such attempt. The
question of the newsletter’s politics is not one of some
mealy-mouthed mindless “balance.” We are here as participants in
fandom because we picture what might be. I am proud to follow in the
footsteps of Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, Iain M. Banks, Kim Stanley
Robinson and China Miéville in striving to make real the future of
liberation we all, as fans, imagine.
Ideas
for the future
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Create guidance for future cons about accessible printed materials
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Make a large-print version
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Can you get cheap bulk printing through work or university?
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Integrate with social media
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Do what you can beforehand
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Where does the newsletter fit?
Having been through this wondrous
and intense experience of editing the W75 newsletter I can say I am
proud of the work we did and I am grateful to all those named herein,
and many others, for producing what I feel was a superb newsletter.
Nonetheless there are some areas where I feel that, given more time &
thought, we could have done even better.
The
area of accessibility for readers with additional support needs
should be clarified & set down in guidelines. The absence of such
a standard for cons is a puzzling one and I think that with minimal
reflection, we could quickly revolutionize fans’ abilities to
engage with the content conventions produce with a minimum of
barriers. One item which has been drawn to our attention: while
light-colored paper was the correct choice, we should have avoided
shades of red and green as these appear as grey in the most common
form of color-blindness.
A
simple thing we could have done to overcome many accessibility
issues, which we did not think of until it was too late: we could
have produced a large-print, plain-text edition of the newsletter in
a limited run for each issue. This would have overcome almost every
conceivable problem with accessibility in typefaces & layouts.
Bulk
printing solutions could have gone differently. While high-speed
one-color Risograph printers seem rare in Finland, other locations
may be a bit luckier in finding one. People with access to bulk
printing through offices or universities may be able to produce
issues cheaply or for free by making use of these resources.
The
role of social media in conventions is still being explored. While
there will probably never be an absolute substitute for a printed
hardcopy, we could have integrated the newsletter better with W75’s
social media presence. For example, the newsletter itself or
newsletter pickup points could have displayed QR codes linking to the
website where electronic copies would be available. Given enough
resources, we could have even prepared eBook versions which people
could subscribe to. Lastly, as each article was prepared it could
have been distributed to the W75 social media team and tweeted out.
One
refinement we considered, but which was rejected due to complications
and timing, was of pre-printing the masthead of each issue as part of
our pre-Con printing run. This would have allowed us to produce the
header in full color cheaply, with the body text of the newsletter
produced as an overprint. This would have required completing the
design a month before W75 as well as meaning paper designated for
Painopiste could not be used
for other purposes in emergencies.
Lastly,
con organizers should consider where exactly the newsletter fits in
their organizational tree. Painopiste
was produced under the Design Resources team for W75, and we
benefitted from access to layout expertise; but if we were estalished
under the Publications or Outreach teams, it is possible we would
have had more access to writing expertise or to interconnections with
social media.
This
is supposed to be fun
-
Running a newsletter is a time commitment. Make sure you enjoy it.
I
greatly enjoyed my experience running Painopiste.
It was an opportunity for words I’d written or had a hand in
writing to reach thousands of people, and thereby to enlighten &
entertain them. Moreoever considerable weight comes with playing such
a visible role in a Worldcon: I really feel myself to be a part of
fandom history, and this fact motivated me to do the best I possibly
could and to get the best out of my colleagues in producing
Painopiste.
Nonetheless it was a significant time commitment which, necessarily,
came at the expense of taking part in W75 in other ways. If you are
going to be the editor for your newsletter, you should be certain
beforehand that you will enjoy it and are willing to put in the
hours, and you need to start assembling your team to make sure you’re
not left on your own producing it. Fandom,
like consciousness, is a collective activity--do what you do for
yourself and the people around you, to
build up the community in common exaltation.
There are not many higher callings in life.
