Birth of a Magazine

Print is not dead. The sun was just rising above the horizon as a group of excited students and teachers started a journey to Little Rock, Arkansas to visit Democrat Printing & Lithographing Co.

Dr. Husni’s magazine class has spent the past year developing two magazine hybrids called the L.O.U Obserer and the Mississippi Observer. Each student contributed stories and pictures while the teaching assistants acted as editor and creative director.

After spending months writing, designing, and editing, the magazines were finally ready to go to press, and Dr. Husni’s class was going to watch their births first hand.

“Here we are at Democrat Printing now. Walking into At Press where we are going to see what’s just been hot off the press so to speak,” exclaims Ren Turner in excitement.

The students had the opportunity to watch the Mississippi Observer be printed right before their eyes, and received the first copies for viewing.

“It’s an amazing feeling to see your hard work, your effort, your past year of being in class just rolling off the printer,” said Callie Blackwell, Creative Director of the magazines.

Printing is a hard process. It takes a lot of machines that need to be monitored constantly. There are millions of dollars worth of paper stored in the warehouse. A lot of the paper get recycled, as well as the ink.

Not everything is done by machine; there are still some things that need to be done by hand. Checking to make sure the pages are printing correctly with the right colors and alignment is a tedious job, as well as adding any additional inserts.

“So you have the hyper-local newspaper with a macroscopic look of the state inserted into your hyper-local newspaper so it gives you a complete picture of not only where you live but where your state is,” Blackwell explained of the magazines concept.

The LOU Observer and the Mississippi Observer will be distributed around Lafayette County. It is an attempt to revolutionize the way local print is created. The magazines will be entered in to a student magazine contest in May.

“That was really cool to know that I had some part in that to see that what I did does matter. In that paper, to see may article come across, it was one of the reasons I started Journalism I think,” said Jajuan McNeil, a student of Dr. Husni.

There is both a need for print and online in the magazine industry. It will change and evolve, as does everything in the world in order to survive.