Getting Started

The news business is not as romantic or exotic as some folks may assume.  It does not require a special degree or years of journalistic experience.  On the other hand, it is a business, and if you are to be successful (that is, you actually serve your readership and make a living in the process), you must do it well.

Words on paper are the key ingredient of a newspaper.  Great and meaningful photos are also important.  You will need some equipment in order to produce a newspaper that is easily navigated, easy to read, and that has decent and informative pictures.

You will need a computer.  Unless your computer is really old, you may already have what you need.  At least to get started.  It does not need to be a super-computing machine that can scream along with huge graphics, and so on.  It just needs enough memory and drive space to handle decent software.

You will need some computer programs, usually called software. 

Microsoft Word is great for the writing, as it makes the collecting and editing of many words a fairly easy task. If you don't already have MS Word, alternatives include WordPerfect, now owned by Corel.  If money is really tight, there is also a free office package, used by lots of people, called OpenOffice, that includes a Word-compatible word processing program.

Microsoft Word is not used to create or layout the pages of a newspaper. It's for processing words, not pages.

I recommend Adobe InDesign for the actual page-layout software.  You can learn all about it at the Adobe website.  Another popular program is Quark Xpress.  And another one is Microsoft Publisher.  I like InDesign because it does everything I need and is part of a larger creative suite available from Adobe.

Free layout programs include the open source Scribus and PagePlus SE.  If the PagePlus option looks good, you can also buy a full-featured current version for about $100 USD from the Serif website.

A good page-layout program enables you to easily build pages, arrange written and graphic contents, create an entire paper, and export the whole thing to a PDF file, which has become the standard in print document sharing.

In addition to page-layout, you will need  some graphics software.  For example, you will need to build ads for yourself and for your advertisers.  And there are many other special needs requiring some pretty decent graphics, such as special headings for sections of the paper and all kinds of little icons, not to mention the main page banner for the paper.

I use CorelDraw for nearly all my vector drawings.  Occasionally, I use Adobe Illustrator.  Either one is more than sufficient for the job.  And these days, there are great tutorials to get you up and going.

For photo editing and other bitmap (pixel-based images) creation, I like Adobe Photoshop (the full blown version, not the lite stuff so many use), and Corel's PhotoPaint, which comes packaged with CorelDraw in the Graphics Suite.  Again, either one should be sufficient, since both are very capable programs.

You will, of course, need a pretty good digital camera.  You can buy great cameras these days from Canon, Nikon, and others.  I recommend you get a Canon or Nikon.  You won't need to start off with a SLR.  The resolution of the new point and shoots (such as the Canon PowerShot) is fine.  Be careful about trying to find the cheapest possible brand.  Some that claim to be 10 or higher megapixel, lose a lot of quality in less than perfect lighting conditions, and lousy pictures make a lousy newspaper page.

You need Internet access for sending files here and there.  And you should build the paper a website, so you'll need some kind of software and web space for that.  You might start off with a blog, but be ready to upgrade soon after getting the paper off the ground.  For one, you will want to be able to post ads for your client base online.  And you can supplement the paper online.

An office.  Did I mention that you need an office?  You need a place where you can work any hour of the day, and where you can work in relative peace while writing news stories and building ads and pages.  Make sure you have room for the computer, a printer, and so on, plus some room for spreading things out while you sort the contents of your newspaper.

I can't imagine running a paper without a car, or at least a good motorcycle.  You must cover breaking news, sports programs, interview people, sell ads all over your market area, pick up the paper once it's printed, carry papers to the Post Office, to stores and other outlets, and so on.