September Beacon Issue Review

     Overall I think our first issue of the Beacon was a success, especially with only two weeks to brainstorm and assign story ideas, write and edit our stories, and format the newspaper. Although there were many little things I would change about the issue we put out, as a whole, the newspaper looks clean, well thought out and interesting. Most the of the issues with this paper were due to a lack of experience with inDesign and writing stories for the Beacon, both of which will improve throughout the year.     

     My two favorite pages of this issue were the News and Opinions pages. Both of these pages were the best formatted and had the best stories of this issue on them. Even if there were formatting errors on these pages, at least they were consistent. My least favorite page of this issue was the Student Life page because I think there was a lot more that could've been done on that page. I thought the fashion icon article was a little underdeveloped with only 3 questions and I didn't like that one of the pictures wasn't of the fashion icon in an outfit. I also think we should've put something in place of the word search like a hotspot article, or at least given some incentive for doing the word search like a gift card reward.

     However, the biggest problem I had with this issue was the lack of consistency in the formatting of each page. On several pages, certain stories would be outlined with black boxes while others were left without any kind of border and there were even stories where parts of the story were outlined with boxes while other parts of it were left alone. Another consistency issue was that the information in the heading boxes of each page in the top left and top right corners was formatted differently on each page. Some of these boxes were in complete sentences with punctuation, while others were fragments of sentences without punctuation. Although all of these issues are very small and easy to fix, if we can make our formatting consistent in the next issue, it will raise it to the next level.