"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one"
– A.J. Liebling

Thanks to the Internet, now you can. All it takes to be a publisher is knowledge.

Students Weblines Tips contains everything student newspaper staffs and advisers need to know as they start building online school newspapers for the world to see. The authors, with help from a talented crew of university journalists on the one hand and patient computer buffs on the other, will tell readers what they need to know right away and what they may want to look into later.

The “manual” also talks about how journalism articles are written and edited, how a staff can be organised for a class or club paper and what can be done on a small budget. A high quality school paper can be published with very little money; a school with an Internet connection and at least one computer could do it free. The most important factor in a school paper’s success is the staff’s commitment to good journalism.

It is easier to start an online paper than a print paper. There are several reason for that:

• The cost of putting out a year’s worth of online papers can be less than the cost of a single issue of a print paper
• An online paper generally has a simpler design, and a simple structure works best for online articles, so students may find an online paper less daunting than a print publication
• The students keep control of their paper, putting it online themselves, rather than having to use a printing company.
• That also puts the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the students – no more excuses like “the paper was late because the printer couldn’t get it done on time”.

Few schools find it possible to publish a paper more often than once every two weeks, and may publish once a month or only a few times a year. An online paper can truly run “all the news that’s fit to print”.

The interactivity of the online paper can make it serve as a school forum in which students, teachers and administrators can share their ideas.

Staff – where & how to start

Organising a Student Newspaper Staff

What does a school paper need?

• First it needs people to plan the coverage and assign articles – the editors
• Then it needs people to write articles – the reporters – and editors to edit those submissions
• It needs a photo staff, with a photo editor to make assignments and receive photos
• An online paper needs a technical staff to put materials on the Web site and take them off
• A business staff to deal with accepting adverts
• A school adviser who thinks the paper is important for the school as well as for the students who work on it and a supportive administration
  

News Students Can Use

An important part of a newspaper’s role is public service; giving its readers information that enriches their lives or makes everyday life easier. But online papers can provide a level of public service that a print paper cannot dream of. That’s because interactive features can draw readers in to the paper, and virtually unlimited space makes it possible to include many more features, presented in a style and format readers can tailor to their own liking.

Extra Web Site Features

School directory, links to volunteer activities or political activities students might be interested in, tips on finding paid employment, space for Students club publications, map of school and the neighbourhood with popular restaurants and stores marked, information for incoming freshmen, Interactive polls, links to poem-a-day or full-text literature sites, crossword puzzles or other games, a bulleting board for people to find rides to sports, music events, sports descriptions so people who don’t know anything about less prominent sports, like fencing or lacrosse, can attend an event and understand what’s going on.

Reaching Out With Links

By publishing links, the paper is making itself more indispensable to its readers. It can also use links to connect the school community to the wider world, like local, state, national and even international organisations and publications.

School papers can offers a page of links of interests to students and teachers like the local news from the local paper, state news from a national newspaper, comics page from another paper, sports from a popular site etc…

These kinds of thing make online paper much more than an electronic version of a publication that is print at heart. They take advantage of the medium itself to build readership. With so many choices for what kind of reader service to offer, school paper’s staff members could feel overwhelmed but they shouldn’t forget that such decisions can also be interactive. The paper can ask its readers to send in their favourite links and requests for special services, it can let readers use email or online surveys to give their opinions of the services already offered by the paper.

The Public Square

One thing Internet adds to a school paper is the potential to become the school’s public square, the place where all members of the school community can come together to discuss and debate issues and share ideas.

One way to accomplish that is by encouraging readers to send email to the newspaper staff. The staff can also actively solicit email letters and submissions and can set up online bulletin board or chat rooms.

A web paper should draw more email letters than a print newspaper because people are already online and no more than few clicks away from their email when reading the articles. It’s a lot easier to send off an email response than it is to prepare a written response, and easier than leaving a print newspaper to go online to send an email message.

Clear thinking – clear writing

Online readers find simple, declarative sentences easier to read than flowery, complex ones – just as they do in print.
Readers find the active voice easier to grasp than the passive voice – just as in print.

In short, people reading articles on computer screens want them to be clear, clean and direct, the style that characterises news services.

Defining 'News'

News has at least some of these qualities (few news articles would have all of them):
Timeliness – importance – rarity – proximity – human interest

- Timeliness means something just happened is happening now or will happen soon.
- Importance means it is significant to a number of readers
- Rarity means it is unusual
- Proximity means that it is local in some sense; a car accident outside the school may make it into the school paper while an accident across town would not. The closer an event is to the paper’s readers, the less important it needs to be to be considered newsworthy for that audience.
- An article with human interest tells readers something they find poignant or entertaining.

Writing the Lead

The straight news lead is one sentence of no more than 35 words and no more than one comma.

A straight news lead and a news article is objective – it does not take side and is fair to all sides regardless of the reporter’s personal opinions. The lead must contain all the essential information of the article – the lead should also make the reader want to read on to learn the details of the article.

No one expects all readers, or even any readers, to read all of every article, that’s why articles have headlines and newspapers are divided into sections – to help readers find the articles of particular interest.

The form of the lead sentence is straightforward declarative sentence, usually with the verb in simple past tense: subject – verb – object. Use the active voice rather than the passive voice – It is more forceful.

One common exception involves traffic and other fatalities. The standard form in this case is: “Three people were killed on Tuesday….” The intransitive-verb construction, “Three people died… “ would also be acceptable.

Don’t clutter up the lead, or the article, with adjectives and adverbs – a great deal of objectivity can be lost and bias introduced through the use of adjectives and adverbs.

Articles need attribution, and leads often do as well.

Unless the reporter personally observes the event, the article is based on what the reporter learned from some person or some document. Those people and documents need to be cited in attribution because that helps the reader evaluate the reliability of the information.

Usually, the source of the information is not as important as the information itself, so it goes at the end of the sentence, rather than at the front. The usual form is: subject – verb - object, time element (when the event happened) and attribution.

Don’t use familiar names in the lead. The principle behind this rule is that readers find it easier to grasp a lot of information quickly if you begin with something they know or will recognise, then add the unfamiliar details later.

Backing Up the Lead

The most common next paragraph in news writing is the explication of the lead – meaning adding details – putting a name where the lead contained only a description – expanding on the significance of the article by saying why something is happening and so on.

Writing Features

Feature writing is somewhat different. There is more room for creative expression in feature articles because they are more concerned with mood and feeling. They are written as much to entertain as to inform. Still newspaper readers are still in a hurry and are still interested in getting information quickly and easily. That means that certain conventions have grown up around feature articles.

They usually begin with a delayed lead – an anecdotal or descriptive lead.
Instead of the who-did-what-and-when of hard news, a feature often begins with one or two or three short paragraphs to set the scene. Then comes the real lead of the article.

Digging Up the Facts

What to write about? Where do all the articles come from? Becoming an excellent reporter is an endless process, but there are basics that anyone can learn. Reporting is being done in three layers; each has its own dangers for the journalist trying to convey honest and truthful information.

First layer information is the information deliberately generated by various news sources for the express purpose of drawing news coverage. This is the easiest to get. It comes in the form of press releases, news conferences, speeches and statements issued by various newsmakers. For the student press, such spoon-fed information usually comes from the office of the school head.

The danger here is that the information is so easy to get that reporters can be lulled into accepting a contrived version of events, leading to important information being left out of the article and reality distorted.

Of course it isn’t always true that information that arrives unsolicited via announcement, press release, speech is tainted, unfair or untrue but reporters need to be aware that such information is not always the full, complete and fair rendering of the situation, which is why an important rule is to have at least two sources for all information. These sources should not be closely connected to each other. This independent verification will keep many mistakes from getting in the paper, errors that could lead to a great loss of credibility. In practice, it is not always possible to get two sources but before putting anything in the paper, consider: What happens if this information turns out to be wrong? How can it be verified?

The second layer of reporting involves more work on the part of the reporter. It includes the coverage of spontaneous, unplanned events – storms – accidents – the things that happen not because a news source wants to make news but because they happen. The reporter has at least dozen places to go to gather information and then weave it into a complete, coherent article. For example sources would include the weather service, the police, the fire brigade, the Red Cross, area hospitals, power companies, people living or working in or near the affected areas and so on.

Note that a journalist may use both Layer 1 and layer 2 reporting in the same article.
Layer 1 information may well be useful as part of the emerging whole article but the advantage of layer 2 reporting is that the resulting article is more apt to be fuller, rounder, more complete and more truthful.

Specialty Reporting

Specialty reporting is usually either a subject area or a geographical area. The first and most fundamental rule is that the reporter has to go physically to the location. When reporters are under tight deadlines, they can sometimes do the bulk of their work by telephone or e-mail but it is not as good as physically being there.

The reporter needs to get to know people, to hang out, to chat. The way a reporter gets along should be neither tricky nor dishonest, but it does entail learning to be friendly and to pay close attention to what is being said. The reporter need the skills of reading body language, changes in tone of voice and other clues, it takes a little practice to learn but there is nothing magic about it.

Getting along with people is utterly crucial for a journalist.

Interviewing Techniques

Interviewing is almost certainly the most important way that reporters get the information that forms the basis of their articles. There are basic principles to learn, those who spend the time learning them will be better than those who do not. Being a brilliant interviewer may be an art form; being a competent one is not.

• Call ahead or send email to schedule an interview
• Identify yourself by name and publication – Give the nature of the article
• Respect your subject’s time
• For the same reason be punctual
• Do your homework
• Dress with respect for the person you are interviewing
• Plan, give serious thought to the information you want to get from the source and how to elicit those answers
• Don’t be so focused on the point of the interview that you jump right in with substantive questions – An interview is also a social interaction – best one start with a minute or two of polite small talk
• You might want to write down some of the questions, but reading from a list of questions guarantees a mediocre interview. It is far better to let the conversation follow its own path, with a little steering and nudging from the interviewer. You need to listen to the response to one question – taking judicious notes and not trying to transcribe the entire interview – while framing the next one in your mind. It sounds harder than it is. Anybody who’s ever done homework while watching TV, listening to music and fielding instant messages that pop up on the screen every two minutes can master it
  

Writing Sports Articles

Sport writing is among the most popular forms of journalism, in part because sports are, to many, a particularly interesting topic. Sports pages are often the home of the best writing in the paper. The rules of writing are somewhat more relaxed and creativity is encouraged.

The sports pages need especially good writing because in many instances, the readers know the lead of the article – who won – before they pick up the paper. Sports fans are serious about their interests and many will have attended the game or match. Yet readers hang on every word, even though they already know the essentials.

There are, however, some pitfalls that are particular to sports. First fans, team members and sometimes the sportswriters themselves may disagree about the role of the writer should play. The reporters are covering sports, yes, but they are still writing news about the subject of sports. That means that the writers should cover the sports teams but leave the cheerleading to others to maintain that all-important integrity, so crucial to every dimension of journalism, writers must to be sure to avoid slanting their copy. The sportswriter should not apologize for the team or do public relations for it. Similarly, a sportswriter wearing a team shirt cannot cover the team honestly, an even if the writer could, no one would believe it – Remember, the appearance of honesty in journalism is as important as the honesty itself.

Writing Opinion Pieces

While opinionated writing is to be avoided on the news pages, it is the idiom of the editorial page. Editorials and opinion columns are the place for expressing the views of the writers, or the paper.

An editorial is an article expressing the opinion of the newspaper, it is always unsigned, suggesting that the paper, not jus any given writer, believes this way. Editorials always go on a distinct page away from news articles to help maintain the distinction between the two. An opinion column is signed; it has a by-line and often a small photograph of the writer. Conscientious newspapers try to find a range of opinion writers who will not agree with one another or with the editorial policy.

It is a common mistake to believe that columns and editorials, unlike new articles, do not need to be thoughtful and measured. In truth, writing a column or editorial takes more reporting, not less. While the reporting for a news article needs to continue until all reasonable sides can be adequately represented, the reporting for an opinion piece needs to continue until the writer can judge reasonable which side has the strongest case. That takes more work, not less.
Just as in feature writing, there is a bit more latitude in writing columns and persuasive pieces than in writing news.

• First, state what the argument is about
• Next state a position
• The best and most effective pieces then go on to state the opposite position’s best argument, which is then knocked down by the editorial writer’s better argument
• The editorial needs to be fair, just as news articles should be. If the other side as a good case, the editorial should state it as well as possible, it is cheating to set up a “straw man” argument, an opposing argument that can easily be knocked down.
  

Journalism Ethics

Journalism, both its friends and attackers agree, is an extremely powerful thing. The essence of journalism ethics codes is that reporters and editors should exercise responsible self-restraint whilst pursuing aggressively those articles and insights that allow people to govern themselves rationally or give people information they need. The free press system allows all sorts of information to flow.

Balancing Freedom and Responsibility

If an article has any chance of doing anyone any ham (anything from mild embarrassment to more serious consequences), the paper needs to have a good ethical reason for publishing it.

It should be in the public interest to publish the information. The journalist’s most difficult task is appearing to be fair and accurate, and appearance is as important as substance. Credibility also means maintaining a distance between the journalism part of the paper and the business side if the paper sells advertising.

Code of Ethics

Public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.
Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist’s credibility.

Editing: Standards in Action

Editors need to know everything reporters know about news writing, but they also need to keep an eye on the big picture.
While some excellent editors have never been reporters, reporting experience is always a plus. An editor, after all, must know how to communicate with reporters. It is a good idea to start as reporters, and then become editors, after at least a year of reporting experience.

The Editor’s Job

Assigning articles: The idea for an article may come from a staff brainstorming session, or from a suggestion from a reporter, editor or reader. The reporter’s assigning editor, presumably a desk editor or deputy, is the one who approves the assignment and sets deadlines. Since students have many demands on their time, the assigning editor needs to set realistic deadlines, including interim deadlines; when the reporter should give the editor a progress report, when the interviews should be done, when the article should be turned in. Deadlines should also take into account the editor’s time – the article should be turned in at a point that gives editors sufficient time to go over it before publication. The assigning Editor should also decide whether the topic is worth an article or a short.

That judgement could change later, when more information is available, but the reporter should know the target length of the article when it is assigned. The assigning Editor should also start thinking about art at this time and should notify the Photo Desk if someone needs to take a photograph or someone should do an informational graphic.

The Photo Desk should be given as much information as possible about the article so the photographer can plan a strategy for getting the best picture.

It’s up to the editor in chief and managing editor to make sure that desks are providing reporters with the right kind of supervision and that desks are working with the Photo Desk.

Since the paper is online, the assigning Editor should think about what might make the article more attractive on the Web. Maybe the article could contain hyperlinks to related Web pages. If it’s about a concert, for example, perhaps an audio clip could be uploaded to the paper site (recognizing of course that an audio clip will be a big file) Or it might be a good idea to run an online poll to find out what issues are of most interest to students.

Big picture editing: Big picture editing is the first sweep done through an article after the reporter turns it in. The reporter should expect questions and should provide contact information – phone numbers, an email address and a schedule – that will make it easy for editors to get in touch.

If reporters file their class schedules at the beginning of each semester, editors will at least know how to catch a reporter for a quick question.

The assigning editor should do big picture editing. An editor’s first concern is accuracy. Editors may look up information themselves to check something in an article, or an editor may ask the reporter to check something. Or the reporter may be asked to explain things that are unclear or misleading so that part of the article can be rephrased to be accurate. The Internet puts a vast amount of information at the hands of editors. The paper’s credibility depends on getting the little things right. If names are frequently misspelled, many readers will consider all the reporting unreliable.

The Editor also wants to know whether the article turned in is the article expected and, if not, whether the reporter made an error in veering from the assignment. The Editor also looks for any gaps in the article – important questions that aren’t answered or issues that aren’t addressed. To fill some gaps, the Editor may just need to ask the reporter some questions; to fill others, the reporter may need more interviews.

The Editor then looks to see if the lead works – if it reads smoothly and is written to draw the reader into the article, without hyping it. The Editor should not make the article sound more important or interesting than it really is. Often a reporter will back into a lead, starting with introductory material and putting the actual lead in the body of the article. The Editor, looking at the article with a fresh eye, can see that and restructure the top of the article. Sometimes the rest of the article needs to be restructured so the information is presented in a logical order.

Headlines: In a Nutshell

The line editor (who could be a desk editor or copy editor) writes the headline for the article: usually there’s room for about six words that need to reflect the article accurately and attract readers.

An inexperienced editor who has trouble writing a headline might be tempted to try to write a headline on a secondary angle of the article, but a good headline is based on the lead.

Headlines are written in the historical present tense. That means they are written in present tense but describe events that just happened. The exception to that is when you’re reporting on something that happened quite some time ago.
They are some shortcuts that most newspapers allow in headlines. To save space, most papers let editors drop forms of the verb “to be” and the articles “a” “an” and “the”. The headline writer can also let a comma substitute for “and”. What the headline writer should try to avoid is to let one thought in a headline break from one line to the next. That is called a bad break, or wraparound. To avoid bad breaks, keep adjectives and their nouns, and keep verbs and their auxiliary verbs and adverbs, on the same line. Bad breaks make headlines hard to read, and editors of online papers need to make their publications as reader-friendly as possible.

While the readers of print papers may skim the news, online readers may zoom by at warp speed. So headlines should be as lively as possible, and that means vivid, active verbs. Feature articles always present a challenge because the headline writer wants an intriguing headline that does not steal the best lines from the article. Some of the tools of poetry – alliteration, meter, allusion, metaphor – can be used to create the best feature headlines.

Mirroring the World in Images

Photographs and graphics add pizzazz to a Web page, as they convey additional information to readers. While it may take high-quality equipment and a lot of skill to put professional-quality images online, it takes surprisingly little equipment or expertise to put up good images.

High-resolution images can be overkill for a website while the prospect of getting photographs into a computer and then onto a website might seem daunting, the Photo Desk on a school paper probably faces its toughest challenge in trying to get a photographer at the right place at the right time to get the right shot.

Taking Pictures

The most important thing for the student photojournalist to keep in mind is elementary, but is overlooked over and over again. You can’t take pictures of any sort if you do not have your camera with you, loaded with film and batteries and ready to go to work.

Some photo shoots are planned, but many, and perhaps most, interesting and important pictures come about because something happened and a photographer happened to be there to record it. You can’t fully control where you happen to be when unpredictable photo-worthy events take place, but you can control whether you are ready to take advantage of an opportunity when it arises. So first rule of good photography is take your camera with you. Everywhere you go.

Editing Digital Photographs

The limitations are more ethical than technical. Just as journalists try to be as accurate as possible, photo journalists present reality as well as they can, rather than a staged or altered version of reality. For news and feature photographs, you can, from an ethical standpoint use electronic editing to do the kinds of things photographers are able to do in a conventional darkroom to enhance appearance.

That means the photo can be cropped to remove extraneous background, but the cropping should not call attention to itself – do not chop parts of people’s limbs or crop the tops of their heads (unless you’re trying to draw attention to the eyes to make the photo more dramatic).

You also do not want to crop too close to the face – the general rule of thumb is that the photo is cropped below the knot on the person’s tie (or below where the tie would be if the person was wearing one) A person in a photograph should be looking into the page, not out of it; you can move the photograph on the page, but you should not flip it, using a mirror image, to get the subject looking in the preferred direction.

You can make the photo darker or lighter, you can add contrast, correct colours to make them more realistic, get rid of red eye but you cannot remove people, objects or imperfections from a photo, change backgrounds or add things that were not part of the original photo.

Given those ethical constraints, student photographers probably do not need a very powerful photo-editing program to handle ordinary news and feature photos. It is ethical, however, to employ all kinds of visual legerdemain to create photo illustrations, images that are obviously created, and that does require some computing power. A photo illustration should be clearly that – it should not be possible to mistake it for an actual photo. The caption describing it should plainly say that the image was created. Graphical elements can be combined with photographic elements to create a photo illustration.

Graphics

The same kind of programs that can be used to edit photos can also be used to create graphics. On a school paper the Techies should be able to double as graphics editors.

The most important thing to be concerned with in designing a graphic is accuracy. A scale should be chosen that tells the story fairly, making the point clearly but in a way that is fair.

All facts in the graphic should be double and tripe checked. It is embarrassing enough to have an error in the article but it is worse to have an inaccurate figure displayed in a graphic.

Technical Stuff

To put out a small publication like a school newspaper, you either need to have some understanding of the computer technology or you need to be able to rely on people who do. The advice is aim to steer schools toward the easiest, simplest ways to put high school papers online, and toward the resources that can help when they are ready to pursue more ambitious plans.

Web Site Basics

Theoretically, one dedicated computer would do, but even if students are able to do much of their writing and editing elsewhere – on computers in libraries or in their homes – having several computers for the papers use would be a plus.
The school also needs something called a Web Site Hosting Service, which is more than just a place for the site files to reside – the computer host must act as a server, able to receive requests from information from other computers on the Web and able to fill those requests by sending out data.

If a school’s paper will carry photographs, the staff will need at least one digital camera. It will need some software but it can manage entirely with free software.

HTML

A Web page can be written entirely in HTML – it is not a programming language – it contains the format information the browser uses to display a Web page. When you use a word processing program like WordPerfect or Microsoft Word, you know that you choose a certain type size, font and weight for a document. If you are doing a document with titles and subtitles, you can vary those specifications for each part of the document etc… That’s just the kind of thing HTML does for a Web page.

HTML is easy to learn, you do not have to become an HTML expert to use it. There is a lot of software out there, much of it free that will make you look HTML smart even if you aren’t. You will find that HTML coding and Web design isn’t all that hard.

A good place to start learning about HTML is at the site built by the people who impose order on the chaos of the online world: The World Wide Web Consortium, also called W3C. The standards for Web protocols like HTML are set by W3C. If you go to the W3C site, click on HTML in the menu on the left – under What is HTML? is a 10 minute guide to click on – a link will take you on to more advanced HTML when you are ready.

HTML tags also set up what makes the Web the Web: hyperlinks, which take the person who clicks on them elsewhere in the page or to another Web page or document. A hyperlink can be a piece of text, the Web address itself or an image file.

HTML tags can be written in lowercase or uppercase letters – with some exceptions that an HTML beginner is not going to run into – but some people prefer capital letters because it makes the tags easier to find in a page of text.

Text and WYSIWYG Editors

There are text editor, some available free and some for a small charge, that will do your HTML coding for you. There is also what is called WYSIWYG (pronounced WHIZ-ee-WIG) editors.

There are many free and low-cost options for text editors. Here are a few examples: For Windows, one good and free text editor is Arachnophilia, written by Paul Lutus (who explains on the site why he calls this program not freeware or shareware, but “careware”). Files formatted in a word processing program like Microsoft Word can be saved as RTF (Rich Text Format) files, then imported into Arachnophilia, which will convert the formatting into HTML code. A good free text editor for Macintosh is BBEdit Lite from Bare Bones Software.

Before looking too far a field for HTML text editors, take a look at the software on the computers you have. If your school has bought computers recently, they may have come loaded with useful Web publishing software. If you have Microsoft Word 2000 for Windows or for Macintosh, you can format your documents the way you usually would, then save your formatted documents as HTML files. After you save a Word file as an HTML file, it is easy to format the page.
Inserting a photograph or graphic, for example, is as simple as putting your cursor where you want the image to be and going to Insert on the drop down menu, then Picture, then From File. After the picture pops in, click on it and a Picture toolbar will pop up. By clicking on Text Wrap, you can choose how you want the text to wrap around the art.

The problem is that when Word is used to create HTML files, it inserts coding that is unnecessary for most purposes; it puts in the coding needed so someone can copy the document from the Web and recreate it as a Word document – in effect, the information needed for reverse engineering, if such a term can be applied to ones and zeroes. So the HTML documents you get by saving Word files as HTML are much bigger than they need to be and so full of coding that it is hard to make changes in the HTML code if necessary.

There are programs that will take files saved by Word as HTML documents and clean up the code for you, getting rid of the excess. HTML Tidy from the W3C is one free program that will pare down Microsoft Word’s HTML coding for you.

Shareware and Freeware Sites

http://vps.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia
Arachnophilia, an HTML editor for Windows with many useful features, is free and well worth trying.

http://www.winzip.com/download.htm
WinZip, the file compression software for Windows, is useful for creating a newspaper archive. It is free to schools.

http://www.Download.cnet.com
Down loading page from CNET

http://www.shareware.cnet.com
CNET’s page for searching for shareware on the Web

http://www.jumbo.com
The jumbo site

http://www.sharewarejunkies.com
The Shareware Junkies site

http://www.zdnet.com
ZDNet’s shareware and freeware page

http://www.davecentral.com/windows.html
The Dave Central Software Archive

http://www.netlearning.org.net101/software.html
Downloadable software from the ALN Centre. It also lists other sites for shareware and freeware

Web Hosting Services

Almost any Web hosting service can easily handle files the size that any weekly school paper is likely to produce. Web hosting sites are built to handle the traffic of a least a small and growing business. A school newspaper featuring only text and photographs is unlikely to have the volume or the traffic to tax the resources of even a modest hosting service.

Lining Up Volunteers

Technical volunteers do not need to be in the neighbourhood to be of use to you school paper. If you can line up volunteers who can answer questions via email that will be of great help in getting your paper started

News by the Screenful

Any site design for online paper must also include a plan for how to make it easy for readers to navigate around the site.
The field of Web design is a work in progress. If you spend some time browsing online newspaper and magazines (webzines) you’ll see that publications have yet to figure out just what an online paper should look like.

Web sites shouldn’t all look alike, of course, any more than all magazines look alike or all television programs have the same look and feel but most news magazines have a similar look, as do most youth-oriented television sitcoms. Those standards are still under development in the new medium of the Web.

Design Pluses and Minuses

When people read online, they want pages to load quickly. That means files should be as trim as possible; no bloated code, and watch out for image overload. Images are the biggest files, so they should be saved at the lowest resolution – and fewest colours – compatible with attractive viewing.

Other things that make a page load slowly are animations and frames – Use them sparingly. the line between animations that dazzle and animations that annoy is a mushy one. If things are going to move on the page, they shouldn’t keep moving more than a minute or two.

There are 216 browser-safe colours – but don’t use them all on one page. Or even a lot of them. When several colours are used on a page they should not jar with one another, most should be subdued with bright accents here and there. A gradual shift in hue across a page creates a nice effect.

Readers want navigation bars to be easy to read and to click on – they want to be able to find what they want with a very few clicks – the aim is to keep all the articles within three clicks of the reader who calls up the site. Someone going from the home page to the sports page for example, should not have to use the Back button to return to the home page and shouldn’t have to go back to the home page at all to get to another section in the paper, like the opinions page.

For text to be legible, there should be a lot of contrast between the type and the background. Dark type on a light background is the easiest to read. If you want to put light type on a dark background perhaps on a GIF image of a navigation button, make the light type large and the background quite dark. Red type on black background will not work even if they are the school colours.

Light type on photograph, think twice and check the legibility before proceeding. If you want to sell more ads at the tops and bottoms of pages – use click- through navigation. But if you want to please more readers, lean more heavily on scroll-through navigation while keeping the articles short enough that the readers won’t have to scroll down too far.
As a rule of thumb, readers should not have to scroll down more than three screens of text. If the article is much longer than that, a click-through to another screen may be a good idea.

The columns of text should not be too narrow. A column should be able to accommodate at least 20 characters and spaces per line, even when wrapping around a graphic.

In choosing fonts, those that have been designed for the Web screen may be easier to read than those designed for print.
If the paper accepts advertising, it should be clear on every page where the ads are and where the newspaper content is. Ads should be clearly segregated in one part of the page, and the design should indicate that the ads are commercial messages, not journalism.

Segregating ads usually means keeping them on the periphery: next to the nameplate at the top, in a column on the right, at the bottom of pages and below navigation sidebars on the left side of the page. They should not appear in the middle of the screen, where the reader expects to see articles.

Site Maps

The first step in designing a site is to create the site map. By deciding on its site map, the school paper staffs decide on its file structure as well. Each category on the site map should have its own folder to contain the files for that section. Folders should be named in ways that will be intelligible to the paper staffs the next year and three years down the road.

The paper needs one set of folders to hold the article and image files for the material currently online, a folder set for the new materials the staffs is preparing for the web and another set for the files that have been online and taken down.

The files that have been taken down can be compressed to take up less disk space. Compressing and archiving files can be a complicated process; a commonly used compression program for Windows is WinZip and one for Mac is Stuffit Lite. It is also easy to find compression and archiving freeware and shareware at software compendiums like Tucows and Download.com or at the may other software sites listed in the Links section.

The Grammar of Web Design

The home page: Some layout conventions of a print paper carry over into online design. Sizes of headlines (big to little), placement on the page (top to bottom) help indicate the relative importance of articles. There should be a visual element, usually a photograph, to catch the reader’s eye right away. On a print paper, that means a photo above the fold of the front page; on the screen, it means a photo or graphic in the upper part of the opening screen.

Both an online home page and a print front page have a nameplate at the top. A smaller version of the nameplate can be used on the top of each section page to help tie together the pages of the Web site graphically.

There can be many ways to navigate around the site There may be a global navigation bar, or buttons, at the top of the home page, or at the bottom, or both. A sidebar running down the left side for section-by-section navigation is also usually used. Following these conventions makes it easier for readers, who have probably seen enough Web pages that they look for navigation aids in those places.

The major articles are in the centre of the page, usually in one or two columns, with some articles extending across both columns. Often there is a third, narrower column on the right that contains shorts, sports score, or type designed to take the reader to features like book reviews or columns.

The Web page is usually narrower than the browser screen, so the entire page can be seen with computers with small screens. Consider what the monitors are at your school and try to assess whether most users have newer or older monitors. If your page is narrower than the user’s screen, you’ll be wasting space, but doing nothing more serious than that. If your page is wider than the user’s screen, the user will need to use a horizontal scroll bar – an annoyance to be sure but not a disaster.

Online paper readers will find articles that open up directly more convenient but to lure more traffic to specific pages it might be decided to use links to the relating pages.