Newspapers smell funny.

I don't usually read them these days--I've never had my own subscription and it's been years since I've had housemates who read the paper. But as two of the three pieces to my final packet were meant to be newspaper clips I went and got a few for reference and now my whole room smells like newspaper ink. Yuck.

I was particularly looking for the police blotter section of the paper--I know the Santa Cruz Sentinel has it, but I didn't come across it in the San Jose Mercury News. I ended up using the physical paper as a formatting template (what should the header look like, where does the date go, what sort of font, how many columns should a small article have, what do the article titles look like--that sort of thing) and going online and doing a google search for "police blotter" to get some content templates (what are the prime vocabulary choices for reporting a drug bust--"seized" is a good one, so was "armed with search warrants"--go figure, what sort of personal information about the criminals is provided, are there pictures, and so on).

My next step was to figure out how to print it out to look like a newpaper, but that was an adventure so it gets its own post.....

--The Wombat