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

[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. ;-)