NEWSLETTER

Newsletter Committee Annual Report 2014

I took over the responsibility for the Folk Project newsletter immediately after the Annual Dinner last year. With the help of Liz Pagan, I copied her files over to my computer, received some guidance on how Liz did her work, and began working out the workflow I should use to get the newsletter out each month. I also took several courses at the Lynda.com website, which has much information about the InDesign program used to publish the newsletter.

Over the first several months, I started using the Evernote program to manage the submissions sent in. This helped enormously to keep track of all the submissions and note when and where they were used. I also got a grammar-checking program called Grammarian that helped expose grammatical errors. However, I soon discovered that it was extremely important to have a group of dedicated and talented proofreaders who caught many misspellings and errors in English usage. The proofreading team consists of Pat Brangs, Nancy Kelner, Liz Pagan, and Bill Henderson. They have kept many an error out of the newsletter over the course of the past year. I also began asking people to double-check their submissions before sending them in.

By the way, Mark Schaffer gets the award for most misspelled name in submissions throughout the year. Also, in one submission, both his names were misspelled.

It soon became apparent that a disproportionate amount of time was being spent on formating a few highly technical sections of the newsletter: the Calendar, Venues, and Gigs sections being chief among them. Therefore, I began to develop ways to automate these sections to save time and reduce the errors that inevitably crept in. I wrote a Python program to generate the repeating items of the Calendar section and place them on the correct days, and used several InDesign techniques to create standard paragraph styles to automatically handle formating the Calendar entries. Toward the end of the year I created several databases to handle the ever-changing Venue and Gigs sections, and then wrote scripts to pull the data out of the datebases and automatically create entries to update both sections, as well as create parallel items for the Calendar.

One final change I introduced was to get a program that would sweep through the newsletter and change all the URL and email addresses into clickable links. This allowed readers of the eNewsletter distributed by Eddie Roffman to click on the links and be taken to the corresponding web page or email page automatically. I also created a Table of Contents box on the front page with links to the corresponding pages within the newsletter. This should help readers get to specific information they are interested in more quickly.

Hopefully, with all the above changes in place, I will be able to reduce the amount of time needed to create the Newsletter down to only two days.

Sincerely,

George Otto

Newsletter Committee Report 2014-12

Things are proceeding as usual with help from Pat Brangs, Nancy Kelner, Liz Pagan, Bill Henderson, Paul Fisher, and Eddie Roffman. Pat had 330 copies of the newsletter printed, with 190 issues mailed out and the rest distributed to the usual venues and people. Pat increased the number of printed copies by 30 because we ran out of newsletters at the Minstrel last month.

Following last month's report about creating a database to keep track of the venues information used in the Venues and Calendar sections of the newsletter, I have now done the same for the performers information used in the Gigs and Calendar sections. Along with the databases, I have written scripts to automatically pull the data out of the database and format it for use in the newsletter. This will also allow me to send confirming email to those who submit their gig information, allowing them to proof the data before I use it. This should avoid the problems with miscopying of data that arose several times this year.

I also have put a disclaimer in the newsletter in the above sections saying "Please use contact information to verify dates and times before you go." This should help avoid problems in the event of errors in the future.

Here is example output for the Gigs section generated by my scripts:

Mike Agranoff (www.MikeAgranoff.com, mike@mikeagranoff.com): Fri. 12/5‚ÄÇ8pm, Minstrel Acoustic Concert Series, Morristown NJ, folkproject.org, 973/335-9489, $9; Wed. 12/31‚ÄÇ9:45 & 10:45pm, First Night, Morris County, Market Street Mission, 9 Market St., Morristown, NJ, www.FirstNightMorris.com

Ken Galipeau (www.storyNsong.com, keng@storyNsong.com, 973/983-6611): Sun. 12/7 1–2:30pm, Garden State Storytellers League TELLABRATION, Featured Storyteller/Workshop Presenter, Hamilton Township Library, 1 Justice Samuel A Alito Jr Way, Hamilton Township, NJ, www.GardenStateStorytellersLeague.org, englearnr@aol.com, 609/890-3378, $10 concert, $20 workshop & concert

Diane Perry (www.DianePerryJazz.com, dianeperryjazz@yahoo.com): Fri. 12/26‚ÄÇ8 & 10pm, Scot Albertson's Annual Pre-New Year's Eve Concert, performs second set only, Kitano New York Hotel, 66 Park Avenue at 38th Street, NYC, www.kitano.com, $25 cover + $15 min

Here is example output for the Calendar section generated by my scripts:

12/5 Mike Agranoff: 8pm, Minstrel Acoustic Concert Series, Morristown NJ, folkproject.org, 973/335-9489, $9

12/7 Ken Galipeau: 1–2:30pm, Garden State Storytellers League TELLABRATION, Featured Storyteller/Workshop Presenter, Hamilton Township Library, 1 Justice Samuel A Alito Jr Way, Hamilton Township, NJ, www.GardenStateStorytellersLeague.org, englearnr@aol.com, 609/890-3378, $10 concert, $20 workshop & concert

12/26 Diane Perry: 8 & 10pm, Scot Albertson's Annual Pre-New Year's Eve Concert, performs second set only, Kitano New York Hotel, 66 Park Avenue at 38th Street, NYC, www.kitano.com, $25 cover + $15 min

12/31 Mike Agranoff: 9:45 & 10:45pm, First Night, Morris County, Market Street Mission, 9 Market St., Morristown, NJ, www.FirstNightMorris.com

Sincerely,

George Otto