Press clips

[jethrien]

Once upon a time, boys and girls, you documented press clips by cutting them out of the newspaper, typing such niceties as the paper's name and circulation and the date the clip ran on the top of another piece of paper, and taped the clip to the labeled paper. Done, yay. No ads, no banners you didn't want, just the clip and the publication info. You could make photocopies of this, if you wished.

These days, half our press clips are from online sources, and we store them online. I've done a bunch of different methods of stripping info to make a press clip. Some of them have "print" buttons that actually format it as a clip for you, and these people are a joy forever. But some "print" buttons strip out all the photos, headers, and a lot of formatting. Not so helpful. And a lot of websites don't even have print buttons. A lot of them aren't formatted to be pinned to a piece of paper at all. Which is all Web 2.0-y, infinite canvas blah blah blah, except I need to be able to mail physical copies of good reviews, please.

The fastest way I've found is to print the webpage (which strips out the ugly backgrounds of many), then basically cut it apart and reassemble it, a la an old fashioned clip - I figure if it was ok to get rid of the lingerie ad that was next to the review in the Times, I can also get rid of the "most clicked links", the inane comments section, and the mess that used to be two dancing people selling mortgages. I tape what's left to a piece of paper with the title typed on the top, and (the most ridiculous step of all) scan the whole mess. Am I being an idiot? Is there a better way to do this?

Comments

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

If you have acrobat, you can print the webpage to a pdf, then edit the pdf. But I'm sure there's a more sensible way than that.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I've tried Photoshop, but I genereally end up taking longer than just printing and physically cutting.

Part of the problem really is that it all depends on how the site was coded, and it's not consistent. The ones that are easy to do electronically generally already don't need much. The really messy ones stay messy as long as it's electronic.

[lithoglyphic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was thinking to save the page as HTML and edit the source code, but each of those pages is probably generated by a database or something and refers to half a dozen outside files for formatting and whatnot.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Yuppers!

As I said, the easy ones are easy - they're formatted to be printed. The hard ones, though - oh, what a mess.

[oblvndrgn.livejournal.com]

If it's one block of text, you can print it to pdf or image or whatnot and basically treat it as a normal picture and just crop out what you need.

A quicker way to reassemble it is probably just copy/paste all the text in the article into a word doc and then copy each image that is relevant individually and paste that in as well. Format as desired. Not ideal but probably quicker than physical cut/paste and re-scanning.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

If it were me, I would value consistency (both of formatting and of storage format) in my press clip archives. Thus, I would do exactly what you're doing, only I would do it all in Photoshop: print to PDF, open a hi-res copy (at least 300 dpi) in Photoshop, flatten the image, delete the stupid parts and move around the rest, and add my standard title/archiving material as desired. Save this as a Photoshop document for your archives, so the title text etc. stays editable and you can move elements around later; then (since you say "store them online") save a copy either as PDF or JPEG depending on how you intend people to access and use it.

This *might* take more time than print-cut-tape-rescan, at first, but I am certain that for *me* it would be at least equally fast, and save all the interim printing!

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I probably should. The one advantage of printing things out is that I know for certain it will fit properly on a standard page, but if I pay enough attention in Photoshop I should be able to deal. The problems really start when it's a three page clip.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Ohh, multiple pages! Definitely PDF and not JPEGs then. Though you can still store them in a single Photoshop file if you get tricksy with the layers. ;-)

[fairylane.livejournal.com]

I was dealing with press clips all day too! Except mine were from the 1960s, so I definitely didn't have any of your printing issues. Unlike most of the horrible web ads, though, some of the most entertaining parts of old newspapers are the ads for things (like really early proto-computer lessons) as well as the surrounding article. I wonder, if you left in the ads, if people from 2060 would find them as entertaining. Probably, but it's still a lot nicer to leave them out as you're not trying to provide future sociologists with advertising material...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I used to just copy paste the text of the article and then slap the masthead on top, but yeah. No good way to do it.

On the other hand, you're not trying to run badly taped pieces of paper through the photo copier!

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Well, that's what the plate is for.

I did finally figure out that the reason our scanner was putting blue dots on everything was that there was a splatter of ink on the glass plate. Fortunately, it came off with some gentle but persistent rubbing.