An NPF monthly newspaper?
 

I have a crazy idea (meaning Thorque left me alone for a few seconds). We need a group project, something the whole forum could be proud of. However, I was thinking that there were some things that we could not do unless in person. Then the idea struck when I was looking over the AQ Paxia forum. A newspaper.

Why doesen't NPF have a monthly newspaper (maybe an E-zine would be better)? We can work on something like this where we write about articles, some sections with comics and pictures, etc.

I think it might be fun to be doing this once every month. A great way for the community to bond. If there is enough interest in this idea, we'll get it underway (and we would probably need Mod permission too). So, anyone like this prospect? Also, any idea submissions would be great.

I like this idea and would love to contribute to the comics section.

What would it be covering? Stuff that we would throw in the Public announcement thread? Information about other forumites, such as what they've been up to? "Most pageviews on a thread"? Details on what it covers before I say, hells ya.

But All those things are hells ya ideas. :P

I like this idea.

I volunteer for the comics as well, or mebbe a writer for an article. I've been told I'm a good writer.

Well, it would involve writing articles about things that you made up. It can be either real or fake. You might make an article about Fifthfiend becoming a mod. You might make a humerous article about how somebody did this or that. Humerous or real (or both), there would be a need for a combination of writers who do various sections.

I'm glad there is some interest in this. Hopefully I would be looking for 9-14 writers, 2-3 comicers, 1 editor to look over the articles and judge which go into the newspaper for the month and 1 person to manage the whole thing. If the prospect grows really popular, I might divide it into various sections.

This is going the same way as the Nukies, isn't it?
Lot's of enthousiasm, quite some contributions and then it dies a painfull and horrible death.

But... I might do some short stories after I see the pilot 'paper.

You just have to be well organised. Try to find journalism majors, graphic artists, etc, who would have a vested interest in helping.

I have an idea, but Brian might not agree with it. How about including all of 8-bit theater's episode for that month (or week)? They're much better read together since you're able to keep in mind the story that happened a week ago, and it is very story driven. Normally it's like reading three lines of a novel every other day.

You can definitely put me in for a weekly humourous article then. I definitely like this idea.


ooh! I'll do the horoscopes too!

If you really want to do this, maybe you should accept some articles and such from "freelancers" as well (those who may come up with a good story from time to time but don't want to get committed as one of the "Writers") In my opinion, if this thing really gets going, it would help keep it from getting stail and from the actual writers from getting writers block too much.

I agree. I'm glad somebody thought of it.

Ok, cool. Horoscopes sound like an interesting idea.

This is going to be a newspaper about the forum itself. The comic characters may have a guest apearance in an article, or there may be a column or something, but the comics have nothing to do with it really.

Deal!

Ok, but I have not seen any of your work, that I can remember. If you could submit something to see how you are.

I'm glad there has been responses to this.

I'll do the gossip colum. ;)
Or perhaps, a weekly colum,
Letters to The Space Pope.
I love it.

Make up your mind. Both sound great though.

Wouldn't the idea fall under the "8-Bit Forum" part of the newspaper? Make that a section with something on it? Honestly, the comic is the only thing half intesting that involves the 8Bit forum MOST of the time.

Also, Obituaries=Banned peeps. And I'd completely be able to add my own part...I had an ENTIRE THREAD that was basically "Ask Mesden" at one point and people seemed to enjoy it, as I got responses on end. Then I could run a Mafia like section for forum games...Multitasking isn't hard, but if you want me on one thing, then I'd be mainly for the former.

We could have a Whats New indicating new movies or games being released and have someone give a review. Or a NPFer of the week which highlights a NPF who stands out for a particular week.

I wanna write stuff. Or be an editor. Whatever.

I so wanna do an advice column!

Hmmm, well, we can't have too many advice columns, but it would be fun.

Could we also, maybe, do some book reviews?:ninja: I suggested started a book club on the forum a while ago, but the mods shot it down.

Well, shit. If you're really serious about this 'paper, I think I can spare some time to write some short stories.

I'm in, I think.

EDIT: Though, one thing, if I do, all rights for the story (and characters, if they're gonna be original ones) remain with me.

I had the same thought.

I will be impressed if you manage to pull off one issue. I will be shocked if you pull of a second. A third? I will eat my words and post ridiculous pictures of myself. How's that for incentive?

Well, should it not go the way of the Nukies, I'd be happy to make shit u--er, contribute to the writings side of things.

I could do game/movie reviews.

And maybe evey week someone could contribute a top 10 favourite or best new games/movies/tv shows/animes/songs/remixes etc list.

And maybe a moderator(becuase a general one would be hard to keep track of) quote of the week picked by the main editors, people could PM one of them when they see a good one. The editors could just decide or let the number of PMs act as votes and only decide as tie breakers.

I classify as what you would call a "comic artist".

I could see it now though... "And in recent news, 500 new asshats joined the forum in the last month, and only three had anything interesting to say. Also, Krylo banned some people and Brian continued to not care."

I'm a football nut, too. Perhaps if you have no need of an umpteenth artist, you may have a need for a spor's writer?

Just as long as 1. you don't try to run the entire thing according to Robert's Rules of Order, and 2. 90% of the articles aren't people saying how goddamn hilarious that fifthfiend fella is! then you should stand a decent chance of, well, failing in a completely different way from the way the Nukies failed.

But the Nukies were so good at failing.

Also, honestly, it died because the creator vanished. CMP's been gone for quite a bit, you know.

So, here we are. MAYBE Garud will live long enough.

I sort of imagined CMP left because of his contest going to hell, really.

(I'm not looking to write anything in the newspaper, but I'd interested in reading it.)
Ideas mentionned so far:

Short stories
Advice columns
Video games/movies briefs
Banned Obits
Gossip Columns
Comics

Anyways, here are my opinions. I'm against any kind of recurring articles since they're too much to handle and would get abandoned, at least at first.

However, short stories are along the lines of good ideas, since they would tend to be posted as they're written. A newspaper should service a demand that isn't satisfied by forums, and I think short stories aren't at home in crowded threads. You can't immerse yourself in the black-grey-blue theme here.

I don't like the sound of columns, because they're too personally-centered. Editorials on a vast range of subjects covered in discussion, general, and even off-topic would be great, because they would allow for longer, better developed entries than their forum counterparts.

I don't really have an opinion on media reviews because I don't really follow them.

Banned obits. Excellent! Great for people who want to know why they've been banned, and for other people to laugh at them/sympathise... maybe. It might not be very active, but it would satisfy a demand that's vacant right now.

I don't have an opinion on gossip columns.

As long as there some quality control, comics would be good. Things short enough not to warrant their own websites, but with good gags.

I don't think Mesden and fifthfiend are making GARUD very comfortable.

I really don't think the community is large enough for this kind of thing to survive. If you look around, these are still rather middling as forums go. I'd expect something like this to be well suited for forums such as the SA forums, where you can't keep up with everything even you you're on them 24/7. Here, there's just little to actually do. Decent enough idea, I just have those doubts.

It's like, our job. Well, it's the total opposite of his job and he just likes to respond to me when I respond to him.

Me+Fifth=Horror. Oh man, seriously, think about it.

How fucked up am I?

How fucked up is Fifth?

That's enough fucked up to make anyone comfortable.

Also, I can totally make a "Make me into this song!" section. I'd pick one person a week with a good choice of song and their own character and shove them in there to fit.

I can FEEL the flooded PM box already.

Maybe we could have a sort of advertisements section.

the only way I'd be involved is if Mesden has no say in my content whatsoever.
Other than that I am just gravy.
Other than that the Letters to TSP AAAANNNNDDD a few news articles a week.

I've been thinking and I coulda also reccommend an anime to watch once a week. This is just so every part of the forum would be represented.

We could do a comedy bit. Having two NPFers get in a heated debate over somehting trivial.

Or a short story using NPFers as characters

You mean like teh discussion forum?
Ba dum bum Tink.

Iamsofuckinghillariousithurtsmyhead

But honestly, are you talking about like an editorial debate like theonion used to have(or still does)
Like
Why good music sucks
BY emo mcfaggypants
vs
Why emo music sucks
By the rest of america.

Something like that?

I wish skyshot would edit MY posts half the time so I agree.

I could help you with that. I didn't get 98% in English 12 for nothing.
Okay, so i'm a fugging liar. But i still know improper spelling and grammar when i see it.

Shit, if I hadn't offered a short story already, I'd slap you all silly with your own grammar and spelling.

Pshhh.

Normally that'd be fine, but it's humiliating when the guy doing it doesn't even speak English as his native language.

I mean, couldn't you toss in the occasional malapropism or at least a funny accent? Wish granted, in a fractional sense.

EDIT: My proposal for editor status has reminded me of this.
http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/2...slettergm9.jpg
Strips taken from page 176 of Seven Years of Highly Defective People, by Scott Adams. Go read it; it's awesome.

Actually Space pope it would be like this

ex Rap music Good or Bad:

It would put two people against each other and making arguments with each other and each response would get more convoluted and crazy. It would obviously be a comedy style.

an example

Space Pope: Rap music is good and a new wave.
Melfice: No you are wrong. Its country. I hate your opinion and I hope you die.
Space Pope: Well at least my music isn;t brought by inbred country hicks.
etc etc.

It wouldn;t be long either.

please don;t hurt me, I was just using you two as an example

I wanna help with something. Review guy? I've done some writing for local papers.

Something that came to mind, if we want this not to go the way of the Nukies(and pending Brian's permission) we should make it an 8BT/NPF newspaper combined.

Ach, now why would I do tha', lad?
I had thought zat mein English skill ist somethink to be proud of, nein?
To sink zat zees forums 'ave furzered mai skills, it's somezing to be proud of as ze communitee.

Thank you, I'll be here the rest of my life.

EDIT: Oh, and don't be ashamed, I've had a lifetime of cartoons to train me. ^_^
EDIT: Oh, and that's totally not like me, insulting people.
EDIT III, because II was too lazy: This is the last off-topic post of me...

Well, I was the editor of my college newspaper and I was a reporter for a regular newspaper for a few summers. I reckon I could help with some editing. I wrote a regular column for the five years I was in college too, so I guess I might could help with that (depending on how often I'd have to do it).

Out of curiosity, how are you planning to publish? Would it be on this site or would you be putting a link on this site to another that is just the newspaper? Or perhaps an e-mail newsletter?

EDIT: *smacking myself upside the head* I just had an idea about how it might be published: create a subforum -- The NPF News -- in which each thread is an issue of the newspaper. Each post in the thread is an article. For good organization each of the regular articles (columns, comics, obits, etc.) would need to be posted in the same order each time. To make it read-only the thread should probably be closed after all the articles are in. To do that, we'd probably need a mod involved (perhaps as E-in-C or Publisher or something like that). I nominate Fifthfiend on account of he's the only mod I've seen post (hence probably the only one likely to be interested?) so far in this thread.

If I can offer an idea.

If you are going to have a core group of writers, why not also keep it open for some freelance stuff. Back at one site, we did one for fanfics and I was a regular writer even though I wasn;t listed. That way everyone can have a voice.

Ok, looks like there is some backing behind this. Glad to see it.

Now, first, we can't have too many columns. 3 at the most. Mostly, we will be writing articles.

Now, I think there needs to be someone who puts it all together. I'm not sure how we should format it, but a word document would be pretty boring, and posting an article in post form would be more so. I'm thinking something in Adobe PDF format, but I don't know.

Anywho, glad there is interest. Let's see. I should go over and see who wants what sections to do.

The core group of writers idea is what I was thinking, with the freelance writers on the side.

To lucidate my desired position:

Writer of a column or of articles, although I have no idea what these "articles" shall be about

Or Editor of some fashion, be it the head guy, or one of the mini-editors tasked with making sure that when the Head Guy reads the articles his head doesn't pop from crappy grammar overexposure.

Eh, I'll do comicking or article writing or whatnot.

I would have to say that if we do allow this (and that's a rather large if) it would have to be a bit more democratic than "Garud says what we're doing."

More along the lines of random forumer 1 says, "Let's have a _____ (video games, advice, news, movies, porn, whatever) column/section," and then the other people who are active in the newspaper say, "No. That's stupid and so are you for mentioning it," or, "Sweet, dude! Totally fuckin' sweet!"

Then we're like "Ok, most people think ____ is a good/bad idea" and decide what to do from there.

Because, you know, this reeks enough of "I'm so special and everyone sucks compared to me and my newspaper clique" without making someone lord, god, and master of it all by his little self.

Does it? Well, I suck then. But democratic does sound good. I'm pretty sure if we can get a general consensus on a topic we can include it. However, there are no staff as of yet, and I'm still in the planning stages.

What is wrong with having more than three columns? Columns are more than Dave Barry humor peices or Ask That Strange Mysterious Woman About Embarassing questions, it could be book reviews, movie reviews, basically content types that are set. You can have a different people do a column article from issue to issue. It doesn't have to have the author set in stone.

And once again, I'll say that the community itself is not big enough to generate steam to keep this afloat. Given the number of people active on the forum at any given time, I'd estimate to be around 200 to 400, and I'd say no more than half would be interested in it. That's an awful lot of work for an audience of 100 to 200 at most, and a good chunk that wants to contribute in some way shape or form.

That said, I'm throwing my hat into the ring. I've worked on my high school newspaper for a couple of years (one as an editor for the Entertainment section), so I've got some experience under my belt. I'm not all that proficient in grammar and spell-checking, but since we're typing it up (if this goes through), we have those already.

Even then, that's the Copy Editor's job XP

Also, I agree with krylo; my school paper suffered from low levels of readership because the teacher wouldn't let us run stuff that the students really wanted to see (although I did manage to slip in the occasional video game reviewwhile she wasn't looking). Any piece of journalism should include what the readers want to see within reason.

Suggestion for the publication's name: The NPF Stomp. Oh Yeah.

Yeah, pretty much I read that three-columns-only thing, and I got this sudden image of someone getting one of the columns, and then suddenly acting like they were the biggest goddamn deal on the internet, and entitled to go around being pretty much as much of a puffed-up jerkoff as they like, because they had their very own column for the 8-bit-theatre internet webcomic's online discussion forum's community newspaper.

And then I threw up, for like half an hour.

That alone should disqualify you from all involvement.

And if at all possible, all of decent humanity.

Like, if we had another Australia lying around, where we could just quarantine the undesirables.

That's where your kind would go.

When I read it, I didn't read it as only the same 3 people with columns each week, I read it as a changing 3 people each week. I mean common, we're talking about EACH WEEK! Some of them are gonna give. We're probably gonna rely on alot of freelance for the articles too. Especially once school starts up in the next month or so.

Also, I was thinking we could have an over dramatization of a thread that people found interesting in general (from long ago in the past, to recent history) or a humorous retelling of one of the better mafia games.

Replace "column" with "Super Mod status" and "newspaper" with "forums" and you've got a pretty good description of a certain fifthfiend.

But I digress.

In actuality, working on a high school paper probably isn't worth much, but man, those burritos on deadline nights were good.

Not to mention you'd be envious of the crazy awesome Guitar Hero parties we'd be having. All night long.

On-topic: if this goes through, there should be a section written specifically by Brian. He was the founder of NPF, after all.

A summary of the better fights in the Versus thread could be made to look like a sports result.

In last night's showdown Giant Man beat New Super Mario with a debilating air pull and a vicious slam.
When asked about the outcome Pym stated that he thought it was a good match.
Mario simply commented "It's a me Mario", obviously suffering from some form of concussion.

Your raging envy is the spice on my ambrosia, here at the feast of forum godhood.

Oh man, you guys look like ants from up here!

There is a section written specifically by Brian. It's called the Home Page.

Oh, the things I could say...but I've been banned enough recently. So I'll just say Fifthfiend rocks and be done with it.

Really, I've nothing more to add. Hah, you think I'd put something contrary in secret text, didn't you? Well, you're wrong, sucker!

Well, since we're kind of elucidating upon our willingness to serve, I'll do so:

1.) If there's only going to be a few columns (which isn't necessarily a bad idea) then I'll go ahead and retract my offer to write one and leave that to someone who wants it more.

2.) I offered to be an editor but I'd like to qualify that by saying that I do not want to be any kind of in charge. I've only been 'round here about a month and probably don't have the deft feel of the community someone would need to be making content decisions. However, I'd be ever so happy to be a grammar/spelling nazi.

3.) If we're looking at a PDF format, I've got Photoshop (although plenty of other people here probably do too, but I'm just saying so because I don't know if the GIMP that I hear about can create PDFs) and plenty of pagination experience.

I've been in your place before. It's highly overrated.

But I, too, digress. I've already thrown in my two cents and don't feel like reading this thread anymore, so if anyone knows I exist, drop me a line should ye be interested in a sports column. Or random one-off comics.

But the ones that aren't are still damn fine columns.

It can.

Extra! Extra! Page limit reached, thread closed!

If you've got to run another thread for this, 's cool, but try and work out the basics over PM or IM or whatever M, there doesn't need to be a dozen running threads of "I'm gonna do a story" "Me too" "I'm gonna do movie reviews" "I wanna cover the games thread" etc etc.