Opinion

This is the first edition of a newspaper with a staff of one. Every story is about the editor, which is a conflict of interest the paper has decided to live with.

The idea is simple. A portfolio is a set of claims about a person. A newspaper is a format built to make claims legible: a headline tells you what happened, a deck tells you why it matters, a byline tells you who is responsible, and a jump line tells you where to read more. Nothing on these pages does a job a real newspaper would not recognise.

How it is set

The nameplate is set in UnifrakturMaguntia, a blackletter in the tradition of the great mastheads. Headlines are Old Standard, a revival of the Scotch Roman types that newspapers used for most of the twentieth century. Body copy is Newsreader, a face drawn for reading news on screens, with optical sizes so that the small type stays open and the large type stays tight.

The paper is a grey newsprint, not a cream. The ink is a printed black, which is never pure. There is one spot colour, a press red, and it appears in one place on each page at most.

How it is built

The site is built with Astro and published as static files on Cloudflare Pages. The design is a system with three layers, and the build fails if any layer reaches past the one beneath it.

1. Primitives hold raw values: the hex of the newsprint, the type scale, the spacing steps. Nothing reads them except the next layer.
2. Semantic tokens give every value a role: paper, ink, rule, headline, deck, gutter. Components read these and only these.
3. Components are the parts of a newspaper: masthead, folio, headline, byline, prose, figure, pull quote, box, jump line, classified, coupon. Pages compose them and hold no styling of their own.

A script checks all of this on every build. The rules are printed in full in the Style Book, on page H1.

Corrections

The editor welcomes them. Write in on the coupon in the Classifieds.