Published: March 21, 2008 12:13 pm         

MSU class gets inside scoop on The Morehead News

Ray Bailey’s MSU class, Living in an Information Society (LSIM 201), toured The Morehead News offices on Feb. 26. The class is studying newspapers as a source of information in our society, so they wanted to learn how information is gathered, created, and distributed at a community newspaper. The tour was conducted by Executive Editor Denver Brown, along with Publisher Rob McCullough. MSU students taking part in the event included: Vanessa Adams, Luana Barker, Chris Burton, Jessica Cole, Kacie Kadlec, Jessica Roe, Stacey Scott, Jeremy Thacker and Pam Vance.

The class discovered that The Morehead News office is organized into four main departments:

(1) Bookkeeping/Accounting--where all the daily business such as accounts, billing, and subscriptions is done. (2) Advertising--which is responsible for selling ads.

(3) Editorial/Newsroom--where the reporters use software such as Quark, Photoshop, and MS Word to put together the stories and pictures to form the various pages of the newspaper.

(4) Composing--the department which designs and puts together the advertisements for the paper.

The students found out many interesting facts about the newspaper business. For example, advertising brings in most of the revenue for the paper, but each page has what is called the “news hole.” The “news hole” is the part of the page that is reserved for the news stories. To gather all this news information in a timely, accurate fashion, the news team maintains a very close relationship with local agencies and officials. Interestingly, once page layouts are complete, the paper is not printed on site, but is uploaded to a secure server, from which a printer in Ashland creates the physical copies of the paper.

Most importantly, the class was very impressed with the dedication, skill, and hard work of The Morehead News staff. The Morehead News itself is a bi-weekly paper, but the same office also publishes The Shopping News, The Olive Hill Times, and the Grayson Journal. Creating and organizing all this information leads to long, irregular hours. To help manage the incredible workload, members of the staff are cross-trained, so that they can perform someone else’s job if the need arises. Given this high level of skill and dedication, it is not surprising that The Morehead News recently won third place in a state competition for local newspapers.

The entire LSIM 201 class would like to thank Denver Brown, Rob McCullough, and the rest of The Morehead News staff for an interesting and informative tour. The students learned a great deal about the important role the newspaper plays in providing information for our area. We also came away with a respect and admiration for the job done by these hardworking and valuable members of our community.