Q: I have somewhat of a specific question about the best way to assemble clips packages.
Not too long ago I discovered that our ads department saves a lot of our paper's bask issues in PDF format, so I asked a friendly woman there to burn me a disc of stories I wanted to use as clips. The cool thing about this is I can go into Adobe and make very clean-looking clips by printing out specific columns. The advantages were obvious. Not only is this method much cleaner than the standard cut-paste-photocopy approach, but I could also include a printout of how my story was placed on the front page on a simple 8.5x11 page.
The catch to this is not all of the clips I plan to use are available in this PDF format. And frankly, I wonder if this is what recruiting editors really want to see. A recent job opening called for 10 clips, and I felt like my clips package was quite voluminous, as many of my clips are long investigative stories.
So here's what I'm wondering: Gannett just launched a digital archive service that works quite well. I get very clean printouts of any story I've ever written. So is it okay to simply send these out as my clips, without photocopying anything to show how my story was placed in the paper? This approach is very similar to copying and pasting the text of a story into Word, printing that out and sending that along.
I can understand that an editor may want to see how my story was played in the paper and how important it was, but all of my clips ran A1. I want the focus to be on my writing and reporting, and I find that using the Gannett library print-outs is a very clean, simple way of doing things. What are your thoughts?
James
A: It is OK to mix clip formats.
Editors are mostly interested in the content of your clips, and we are used to seeing mixed portfolios that may include clips from more than one newspaper.
Any format -- photocopies, PDFs or printouts like one may get from Nexis are acceptable.
Clips are meant to be examples of your work as published so do not, under any circumstance, change your clips, even to correct an error made by someone else. That crosses the line.
