It is, basically nine sheets of A4 paper, folded to A5, printed on both sides and stapled together. It contains advertisements, articles and  information about our community and several topical aspects affecting residents.

Not much really you might think, but this represents for me, as assistant editor, some 70 hours work. Each edition is started two or three months before it hits the streets. During the final two weeks it takes an enormous amount of work producing the remaining articles, finishing the layout of articles and advertisements, printing it out for proofing, correcting proofing errors and carrying out the editorial changes.

My phone bill has gone up so much, that B.T. have listed our editor as one of my 10 most dialled numbers for the families and friends discounts. Even my mobile phone bill goes up because I need to make calls when I'm sorting things out away from home.

I don't do anything like producing a newsletter in my employment; I only do this sort of thing for W.P.R.A.

This is the fourth newsletter I have produced; it is becoming easier, but not a great deal quicker. The text articles are fairly easy. I start with anything from hand-written notes and typed articles right through to word-processed articles on disk and e-mails. To get these into the newsletter can mean anything from typing out the article myself to just copying the computer file(s) into the space for the article. My typing speed is over double figures, but it can still take me at least half an hour to type out a full article. From disk or e-mail only takes a few minutes.

Our advertisements tend to need even more work. We are anxious to get these right, as without the revenue from our advertisers there would be no Newsletter.


The position of items on a page can be very critical to the layout of the page. I have found that moving things such as the small pictures on pages even very small distances, can affect the layout of a page and cause errors when not positioned correctly. Things can need to be moved as little as 0.5mm or 1/50^th of an inch (20 thou) when laying out a page.

Christmas lights go on see page 5