Archiving your work

Kayaugstin Kott · Jan 12, 2016

How do you do it? Do you have a personal website; and if so, do you copy-paste articles in their entirety onto your website? Or do you link to the newspaper's website? Or do you upload PDFs?

Or do you just keep everything in a folder or on a flash drive?

Rhody31 · Jan 12, 2016

Old school style - I cut out clips. I also have papers I've designed saved to my laptop.
I would find a safety net for links though. Toward the end of my time at my last paper I'd put my best story each week up on the web (chain of weeklies that really didn't want stories up online) so I'd have clips when I wasn't there. I was gone three years ago this month, but about three weeks ago they remade their website and POOF, their old archives are gone, along with my stories that I didn't have an opportunity to grab.

JohnHammond · Jan 12, 2016

PDF of the online article. Save it to Google Drive or Dropbox. No one cares about photocopies, but if an odd duck does, you don't want to work for them.

Kayaugstin Kott · Jan 12, 2016

Rhody31 said:
Old school style - I cut out clips. I also have papers I've designed saved to my laptop.
I would find a safety net for links though. Toward the end of my time at my last paper I'd put my best story each week up on the web (chain of weeklies that really didn't want stories up online) so I'd have clips when I wasn't there. I was gone three years ago this month, but about three weeks ago they remade their website and POOF, their old archives are gone, along with my stories that I didn't have an opportunity to grab.

That happened with my college newspaper. Pretty much everything gone. I have to go through back channels, Googling the exact phrases I used in the stories if I want to find them. And even that sometimes doesn't work.

DeskMonkey1 · Jan 12, 2016

PDFs of page layout. I have PDFs of the web version of the few bylined articles I've done.

SpeedTchr · Jan 12, 2016

Rhody, have you tried archive.org to see if your stories are available in their cache of the paper's site?

amraeder · Jan 12, 2016

Had all of mine on a computer. When changing computers, I just emailed them to myself. I'm probably going to stop caring about them well before gmail goes away. That's the theory, anyway....

Vombatus · Jan 12, 2016

The wayback machine is also good for looking up parts of sj.com that got nuked. Was that 21's fault?

Bradley Guire · Jan 13, 2016

I copy PDFs from the InDesign files sent to the plate room or from the e-edition and keep copies on my computer hard drive and back that folder up to DropBox. If you do any cloud drive, you should be able to send a link to the PDF to anyone interested in seeing your clips, instead of emailing PDFs and creating large email attachments. I've never had a complaint from anyone who wanted to see clips for an interview.