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Article Contents

• Communications Main Page
• Media Communications
• Web Pages
• Stationery and Flyers
• Basic Design Principles
• Credits

Communicating to Members and the Media by Newsletters, Web Sites, and Other Means

Newsletters

Newsletters and Web sites are generally the most substantial communications pieces produced by AAUP chapters and conferences. The variety in newsletters is considerable. Some chapters and conferences produce one or two newsletters a semester; others produce them monthly. Most use an 8.5 x 11 inch format; a few are printed as tabloid newspapers. Some have a small circulation of chapter members; others are sent to all faculty members in a state. Which of these options are desirable and feasible for you will influence many of the other decisions you make about your newsletter.

Logistics

Decide when you want your audience to receive their newsletters (the ”drop date.”) Good times might be early in the fall and spring semesters, shortly before an event to publicize it, at certain stages in contract negotiations. Bad times generally include during and right before breaks and grading periods.

Schedule. Set a production schedule by counting back from the drop date, adding time for distribution, printing, proofreading, layout, editing, and writing or soliciting articles. Have a contingency plan in place in case one or more pieces is turned in late.

While most newsletters are not lengthy, keeping them on schedule can be difficult, and chronically late newsletters can pose several problems: they annoy readers who expected them at a certain time, they are likely to contain items that are outdated by the time they see print as well as errors that are the result of rushed work, and if they drag on long enough they interfere with other commitments and deadlines. It helps to be realistic about what you can actually do, make sure everyone involved understands the schedule, and then stick to the schedule.

Workload distribution. It’s certainly possible for one person to produce a newsletter alone, and it may be tempting to do so since you can count on yourself while other people may submit things late or in poor shape. However, for reasons of both organization-building and workload, a newsletter working group is generally preferable. Include faculty representative of your chapter or conference’s constituencies, whatever they may be: contingent and tenured faculty, humanists and scientists, research-university and community-college faculty. This will help ensure a newsletter that is relevant to, and fails to offend, as many people as possible.

If you must produce the newsletter alone, at least get a couple of people to look over it, as fresh eyes are more likely to spot typos or faux pas.

Think through the steps involved in producing the newsletter and allocate tasks. Some things are more practical for one person to do (handling arrangements with the printer, editing, laying out text, selecting graphics), other things may more easily be done in a group or divided among several people (deciding what goes in the newsletter, writing articles, distribution of the newsletter). People are more likely to agree to do a concrete task, such as writing one article or stuffing the newsletter in all the boxes in their department, than they are to sign up for a more vaguely defined and potentially much larger task like being on a newsletter committee. Draw them in gradually.

Take advantage of the diverse talents of your members. Do you have an economics professor who can write an article about the state of your institution’s budget? A media professor who can write about how to improve the public profile of faculty? Newsletter content does not have to be limited to what your chapter or the national AAUP is doing.

Printing and production. Check with local printers and copy shops for prices and turnaround time. If your chapter or conference has committed to using only union shops, ask if it is a union shop. Ask how to keep costs down.

Ads. You may be able to defray some of the cost of producing the newsletter through ad sales or trades. Ask whether you can trade printing or photocopying services for an ad in each issue of the newsletter.

While ad revenue is useful, and sometimes necessary, selling ads has downsides. It can be time consuming and, since most AAUP chapter and conference newsletters are modest publications, you may not be able to charge enough to make it worth your while. Once you sell ads, you must ensure that your newsletter comes out on time, that the ad reproduces well, and that the distribution is as you said it would be, or you will be defrauding your advertisers. You need a mechanism to ensure that you do not wind up running issue ads for groups opposed to your policies. Running ads takes space, so you may find yourself cutting information from your newsletter in order to accommodate advertising, or adding pages, which boosts costs.

If you do sell ads, you may want to hire a student for a few hours a week or assign one member of the newsletter working group exclusively to this task. If you do not currently have ads, running a couple of free ones at first can help advertisers envision how their ad would look. The most likely candidates to buy ads are local businesses that have a logical connection to your audience: a local copy shop, bookstore, or restaurant; a lawyer or dentist near campus who is willing to offer a small discount to your readers.

If you are going to sell ads, write up a policy covering (a) any kinds of ads you won’t accept (liquor? issue ads placed by your college administration?) and (b) general advertising terms and conditions. Reserve the right to reject any advertising at any time for any reason (but don’t actually do this often or you will lose all your advertisers.) Make clear what kind of ad materials you can accept. Will you take text and format it into an ad? Will you take a PDF? A Quark or PageMaker file?

Distribution. Find out whether you are permitted to mail the newsletters through campus mail. In many places, bona fide campus groups have that privilege. If not, you can divide the newsletters among faculty from different departments, and ask each member to place the newsletters in department mailboxes. Both the cost and the delay of mailing through the postal service make that option the least attractive.

Design

A good newsletter design is mostly invisible—it should silently help the reader find information.

Format. A newsletter can be photocopied onto 8” x 10” paper and stapled, it can be photocopied onto 11” x 17” paper and hand-folded, it can be printed professionally on 11” x 17” paper, it can be printed as a tabloid newspaper, and so on. Which you choose will depend on your chapter or conference’s budget, the amount of time you have for production, and the image you are trying to project.

Printed newsletters often look more professional than hand-photocopied newsletters, primarily because text tend to get misaligned during photocopying. Increasingly, copy shops can print out newsletters directly from your PDF or electronic file, which eliminates this problem. If you are producing a small quantity, printing may be more expensive; for a large quantity, printing is usually cheaper. Printing generally takes longer than photocopying.

Folded sheets of 11” x 17” paper tends to look more professional than stapled sheets of 8.5” x 11” paper. Using 11” x 17” paper means that you work in four-page increments—because each piece of paper, when folded, yields four sides, your newsletter can be 4 pages, 8 pages, or 12 pages, but not 7 or 9. An extra sheet of 8.5” x 10” paper can be inserted loose into the center of the newsletter to create a two-page increment; this is usually more expensive, or more trouble, depending on whether you are paying to have the newsletter assembled or assembling it yourself.

Stapled 8.5” x 11” paper looks informal, but is easy to lay out, quick to assemble with a good photocopying machine, and allows you the most flexibility in length.

Consistency of image. The look of your newsletter should be consistent from issue to issue. People quickly learn where to look for the table of contents or a column they like. Ideally, your newsletter design should match any other publications of your chapter or conference, including letterhead, flyers, programs, press releases, and your Web site.

Layout. Decide on a simple, clean layout and stay with it. Keep the number of fonts to a minimum. Decide whether titles and text will be left-aligned or justified; what font size titles, subtitles, and text will be; where the newsletter date and page numbers will appear; and how many columns each page will have.

It’s generally better to use two or three columns, as text spread across one big page encourages readers to lose their place. Two columns are probably easier to read, but three give you more options with photos and other graphics (because you can make a photo one column width or you can make it two column widths).

If you use text boxes, indent text from the inside of the box consistently. If you use shading, use one (light) shade throughout.

Minimize the number of text jumps (“continued on page 7”) and mark those that you do use clearly.

Leave a decent margin to make the page readable and also to accommodate slight errors in printing and copying. Make the gutters the same size on every page.

All rules can be broken but be deliberate about when and why.

Leave a blank space for address label if your method of distribution requires this.

Banner. Also called the flag or masthead, this is the strip across the front of your first page, and sometimes extending down the left side, that contains your newsletter’s title, publication date, and the name of your organization. (Confusingly, the box listing newsletter editors or chapter officers, typically found on the right side of the second or third page, is also called a masthead.)

It may incorporate your logo. It should have a somewhat distinctive look that stays the same in each issue. The banner’s look is how you recognize your local newspaper without reading the title. In designing it, consider what effect it has on the first page—if it is too big or contains a lot of graphics, for instance, it may interfere with the visibility of stories or photos that you want to place on the page.

Templates. Whether you lay the newsletter out in Quark, Microsoft Word, or another program, you will greatly reduce your labor in the long run by taking the time to set up a template initially. Margin width, location and style of date and page numbers, masthead, and other recurring elements can be saved as a template so you do not have to start from scratch each time. Many programs will also allow you to set style sheets, which remember combinations of formatting instructions (for example, you can save Times New Roman, 14 point, bold as your ”title” style). If you are using Microsoft Word and do not have the time or inclination to create your own template, you can download one for free from http://office.microsoft.com (click on “templates” at the left side of the page).

Style guide. Keep a running list of style decisions so future issues of the newsletter will remain consistent and future editors don’t have to reinvent the wheel. This includes both layout style and editorial style—matters such as whether to capitalize people’s titles, whether to spell out numbers or use numerals, etc.

Photos. Use of photos can make a page more interesting or draw attention to an article. It can create goodwill, since people like to see themselves in print. On the other hand, photos of sufficient quality for print publication can be hard to obtain and their use makes newsletter production more complicated; a simple newsletter does not need to have photos.

Headshots and photos of people at podiums and people accepting or giving awards are common and have their place in newsletters. Crop them so that the people depicted fit the frame. Photos of events on campus, teachers in classrooms, or campus scenes may be more interesting, if they can be obtained and if they are relevant to the text.

Many photos do not reproduce well and so should not be used in a newsletter. This is especially true of digital photos, which should be at least 300 dpi to print well. If you’re using a professional printer, ask if he or she is willing to evaluate the quality of digital pictures ahead of time. If you’ll be photocopying your newsletter, try copying the pictures you propose to use ahead of time. Once you have finished laying out the newsletter it will be too late to drop a photo that you discover doesn’t look good.

In general, photos should illustrate the articles they run with and should have captions explaining what they are. Many people look at pictures and read their captions before (or instead of) reading the rest of the page, so make your captions work for you by encapsulating part of the story to make the reader want to read on or at least to give her a takeaway point. Don’t be afraid of repeating part of the story’s text in a caption; ”layering” information in this way is a tried-and-true technique of magazines. You may also wish to run the occasional stand-alone photo with a longer caption.

Unless you are using an oversized and margin-breaking photo deliberately and obviously, align photos in columns just as you do with text (the photo should not be just slightly hanging inside or outside the text line).

Subject Matter

The topics covered by your newsletter depend on its role in the overall objectives and priorities of your chapter or conference. Will you send it just to AAUP members? To all faculty on a campus or in a state? To administrators and politicians? What messages do you want the newsletter to convey? Plan your tone and content accordingly, while keeping in mind that your newsletter may well find its way to a wider audience. Don’t put anything in it that you’d be embarrassed to have an administrator, reporter, or legislator read.

Editorial policy. In creating editorial policies, you need to strike a balance between being open to your full membership and advancing your chapter or conference goals. While the newsletter should not be (and should not be perceived as being) the tool of a small group of leaders, it should also not be an outlet for members to vent their personal frustrations.

Decide whether to accept letters to the editor, and, if so, whether to allow letters to be published anonymously. Decide whether to accept op-eds that disagree with chapter, conference, or national AAUP policies. Publishing criticisms can stimulate debate, but always make it clear what the AAUP policies are so readers don’t mistake an individual’s opinion for an AAUP position. If you publish letters, you may want to follow a critical letter with an editor’s reply. Your cause will not be helped if the administration, reading the newsletter, concludes that your chapter cannot even agree with itself.

You may want to run pieces that criticize a campus entity for strategic reasons, but no article should defame anyone or insult an ally or any member of the chapter or conference. Don’t print personal attacks or untruths. Controversial points should be backed with evidence.

Decide how authors of articles will be identified. Write down your editorial polices to guide authors as they prepare material for the newsletter.

Story slate. For each issue, plan a list of stories, ads, and other content, taking into account upcoming and past events, news relevant to your members, and the interests of your different constituencies. Include length estimates so you know you have enough content and not too much. Make a map of the newsletter and rough out what will go where (you can fine tune later.)

Make sure each piece is there for a purpose and not just to fill space. A short, interesting newsletter is better than a long, boring newsletter. Detailed documents such as new college policies or contract provisions may be better announced or summed up in the newsletter, and posted in their entirety on your Web site.

Decide who will write each piece and when the copy is due. Decide which story should appear on the front page and which, if any, will be accompanied by photos or graphics.

News and feature stories. News stories concisely present facts of recent happenings. Feature stories are longer, offer more detail or analysis, may focus on a human interest angle, and are not necessarily tied to recent events.

As advocacy organizations, AAUP chapters and conferences practice advocacy journalism. This means being frank about your position on an issue, but it also means reporting the issue accurately.

You do not have to give equal time to opponents, and generally should not, but don’t misrepresent them or quote them only when they say something ridiculous. If you omit facts unfavorable to your position, you won’t educate or persuade anyone, and those already on your side will not learn the information they need to engage in effective debate.

Complex issues should be made accessible to all readers. Use simple language and avoid jargon and technical terms.

Quotes should be used when they shed a new light on something, represent an interesting point of view, or allow the inclusion of a colorful or illustrative phrase. For basic, factual information, generally paraphrase rather than quoting. Make it clear who and what you are quoting or paraphrasing.

Editorials and columns. Editorials and columns give opinions, clearly identified as such, supported by facts. They present an opportunity to interpret facts and to persuade, rather than to blow off steam. Editorials may be written by the newsletter’s editors or may be submitted by readers. They may be unsigned and represent the official chapter/conference position on an issue, or they may be signed and represent the view of the writer.

Columns appear regularly and are organized around either a particular theme or a particular writer. Think carefully before instituting them to be sure they will be sustainable. Columns associated with a certain role (the chapter president’s column, for example), may become a trial if the chapter president does not always have something to say. A column that points out the contents of the newsletter is not worth the space in a short publication.

Recurring items. Recurring items lend consistency to the newsletter and make planning easier (you don’t have to start from scratch each time you set the story slate). If recurring features are kept to the same size and placement, their use will also minimize layout labor.

Examples: A masthead listing chapter/conference leadership. The table of contents. A schedule of upcoming events. A letter from the chapter/conference president. A list of censured administrations within your state.

Stories from the national office. Several types of materials are available from the national AAUP. Press releases, which are available on the Web site www.aaup.org, can be run as stories, as can many other items from the Web site. With the exception of Academe articles, you do not need permission to reprint material from the national AAUP Web site, as long as you attribute it. If you want to edit materials from the Web site, please contact Robin Burns at rburns@aaup.org.

Story collectives. While articles pertaining to local issues need to be written locally, you can save labor by pooling resources to produce stories of wider interest. Arrange with other chapter and conference newsletter editors to share stories—as long as your audiences don’t overlap, the same story can be run in multiple newsletters. Story collectives can be organized within a state, around a theme such as membership development or contract negotiations, or in other ways.

Examples: Stories about statewide legislative issues. Reviews of books on higher education. Articles on how to plan an effective letter-writing campaign or informational picket. Interviews with AAUP officer candidates (but be aware that newsletters cannot spend AAUP funds to promote any one candidate over others).

Filler. Filler should be kept to a minimum, but it’s always good to have some on hand in case you find yourself with gaps in the layout. Items in boxes are particularly useful because they can be resized to fit the space.

Examples: An ad soliciting donations to one of the AAUP’s funds (the Academic Freedom Fund, the Legal Defense Fund, the Contingent Faculty Fund). A box advertising your chapter or Web site or the national AAUP’s Web site. An ad for an AAUP publication. If you’re interested in running an ad for an AAUP event or publication, you can copy text from the Web site or contact Gwendolyn Bradley at gbradley@aaup.org for text.

Headlines. For consistency’s sake, it’s often best to have the newsletter editor or layout person make up headlines. To the extent possible, they should use the active voice and contain a verb. Headlines should generally either sum up the article, so that people who only skim the newsletter still take something away, or pose a problem to draw people into reading the article (“Chapter to Hold Academic Freedom Conference” or ”How Free Are You?” are better than ”Academic Freedom Conference” ). Try to keep them shortish; definitely not more than two lines, and one is often better. Don’t break words across lines in a headline.

Editing. Someone should edit articles, fixing grammatical errors, breaking up very long sentences, and querying authors when their points are unclear. Leave time in the schedule for this, and, though it takes extra time, make sure to consult with authors when substantial changes need to be made. Diplomacy is needed, particularly in a volunteer effort, to avoid offending authors or implying that they are bad writers.

It is most efficient if the editor makes the changes she deems necessary, and then asks authors to carefully read over the edited article to ensure that the substance is still as intended. If articles are too long and need to be cut, the editor can cut or authors can be presented with the article and told how many words to cut. If authors make changes, be sure they know how you want to receive those changes; should they resubmit the article electronically? Should they write changes on a printout so the editor can enter them?

Proofread. Before printing or copying the newsletter, print one final copy and proofread. If possible, use a proofreader who has not worked extensively on the newsletter; it’s hard to catch your own mistakes.

Electronic Newsletters

Electronic newsletters have certain advantages over print newsletters. They save trees, cut costs, and allow you to reach readers more quickly. On the other hand, they lack the substance and gravitas of print newsletters, diminish your control over the appearance of the final product, and may be more likely to be ignored by faculty already overwhelmed by e-mail. A mix of electronic and print newsletters may be best, depending on your chapter or conference’s budget and needs.

Standards. In many regards, the work you will do (forming a newsletter working group, assigning and writing stories, proofreading) to prepare an electronic newsletter is identical to the work you will do to prepare a print newsletter. An electronic newsletter, as opposed to an e-mail, is still a publication of your organization and so should be up to your usual standards. Separately, you may also want to send out informal e-mail communications to members.

Format. The main difference in an electronic newsletter is its format. You can send the newsletter in a long, plain text e-mail; you can send it as HTML; you can attach it to an e-mail as a PDF; or you can post it on your Web site and send out an e-mail announcing where it is posted. Some thought needs to go into selecting a format that is attractive, user-friendly, and compatible with the software common on your campus. If you have the resources to do so, you may want to offer more than one choice to your readers.

Plain text. Sending the newsletter as a plain text e-mail, one article after another, has the advantage that what readers receive will look the same as what you sent. There is nothing in it for recipients’ computers to misinterpret, little formatting to get skewed, no graphics to display improperly. Readers will be able to print it out and it will all be there. It has the disadvantage of being fairly unattractive. Nothing will mark it as a newsletter, as opposed to just a really long e-mail, except its title. You will have few options to set off article headlines. People are less likely to scroll through the newsletter than they would be to flip through a print newsletter, so you need to keep it short and list contents at the top.

HTML. Creating and sending your newsletter in HTML allows you to incorporate colors and graphics. You can make it look more like your other publications, and you can encourage people to read the stories that interest them by including clickable table of contents rather than forcing them to scroll through. But if your audience has e-mail programs that don’t read HTML, graphics will not display correctly and text may be displayed in very long lines that go off the screen.

PDF. Creating the document in a word processing or page layout program and then translating it to a PDF format gives you control over how the document appears while also allowing you to have a more elaborate format than plain text. This may be your best option if you wish to have both print and electronic versions of the same newsletter. The downside is that PDFs are not made for reading on screen. Your readers will have to have Adobe Acrobat readers installed on their computers (available for free on the Web), and they will have to print out the newsletter, so consider whether they have easy access to printers and are likely to make the effort.

Web. Finally, you may choose to post the newsletter on a Web site and to send an announcement of its publication with a link to its address on the Web. This has the advantage of bringing people to your Web site, on the other hand, they have to bother going to your Web site. A Web newsletter allows you to create a design easily read on screen, with shorter articles connected to one another by links; on the other hand, such a design is less conducive to printing.

Length. People do not expect to read long treatises on their computer screens and have little tolerance for doing so. Unless you are sending your newsletter as a PDF, with the expectation that people will print it out to read, you need to shorten your paragraphs and articles so that they are readable. Readers are unlikely to scroll through pages and pages on screen. At least, include at the top a list of contents, so people can scroll down to the one they are interested in.