Online Clips Issue

Italian_Stallion · Mar 22, 2008

I'm hoping someone has a little advice. I'm printing clips from a newspaper's site. The site itself doesn't offer a print option where it brings up a text only version of the page. So I have to print the entire article along with the ads and the flag. I don't wish to print them now. So I thought I'd turn each page into a PDF that can be e-mailed or printed in the future.

The problem is that the PDF seems to display on my computer with extremely small text. When my Adobe Reader views it at 100 percent, you really can't read the story. I must zoom to 130 percent to read it.

I don't want to do this for 100 articles and discover that I'm screwing it all up.

Thus, I'm wondering whether anyone sees it as an issue in cases where I just send out the stories as a PDF. Will editors zoom them, or will they just mutter a curse word and move on to the next person's clips? I'm thinking the latter.

Or maybe I can zoom them and save over the other PDF? I'm not a PDF whiz, so I might need some direction.

Or maybe someone has another solution?

Barsuk · Mar 22, 2008

If possible, I would get hard copies and scan them in as PDFs.

And why are you doing this for "100 articles" when you're only going to send a few clips?

Italian_Stallion · Mar 22, 2008

Barsuk said:
If possible, I would get hard copies and scan them in as PDFs.

And why are you doing this for "100 articles" when you're only going to send a few clips?

I might skip a few, but I haven't saved any clips for the past two years. So I need to catch up.

I'll be applying for jobs across the spectrum. I need clips from different sports, government meetings, general-interest feature stuff, business stories.

mdpoppy · Mar 22, 2008

As someone has mentioned on here before, the easy route would just be to save the story in a word document and ship it out that way (I know someone who applied for, and got, an assistant sports editor position that way, actually).

If you're dead-set on making a PDF -- and it's going to be of only the online print version, anyway -- save yourself the hassle. Just take the paper's banner and paste it on the top with your story on the bottom. It's essentially the same thing -- just be sure to put the URL, so that people can double-check on it.

sportsnut · Mar 22, 2008

I would just copy the story with the headline and url into a normal word document. If they do care to see the original story, they can go to the url that is attached to the document.

forever_town · Mar 24, 2008

Does your paper have PDFs of the page(s) with your story on it?

That could save you heartache.

toolsofignorance · Mar 27, 2008

I was actually curious about this as well, because the majority of my clips to date are Web-based. I'm glad to see a few people suggesting the Word doc route. The ads are annoying to me, personally.

Italian_Stallion · Mar 27, 2008

As long as editors are fine with a Word doc, I'm also fine with it. But I've often wondered whether an editor even knows what he or she wants. In college, I developed this cheesy habit of using big gold paper clips for major assignments. I thought it would show that I really cared about the assignment. It was my way of sucking up. And it seemed to work pretty well. So I have that same thought when it comes to a resume. After all, a person these days can prepare a resume a million different ways. You can burn and send a PDF with video and audio, an example of the photos you took for the Podunk Times and links to every story you've ever written. Sure, that's overkill. But it certainly would be noticed, provided the editor can do such things as figure out how to access the files and actually take the time to do it. That part might be a few years off.