The Nicholls Worth is going to look a bit different to its readers on campus. The Nicholls Worth is going to color. The Houma Daily Courier submitted a bid May 8 to print The Nicholls Worth.

“When we bid, we have to bid a whole set of specs that shows color charges and stuff,” Mark Grey, director of operations for The Courier and The Comet, said.

“What we did was put an opportunity in there for The Nicholls Worth to have color if we got the page stuff here earlier,” Grey said.

“I save a lot of money when I don’t have to bring in somebody in the middle of the night to produce the paper.”

The Courier is saving money and passing the savings to The Nicholls Worth by giving the paper free color on the front page and a 20 percent savings on printing.

This was offered to get The Nicholls Worth to move its deadline from 1 a.m. Thursday morning to 3 p.m. Wednesday.

“It was a carrot I was waving in front of (the staff’s) eyes, for the paper to move into a more favorable print spot,” Grey said.

There are a few things The Courier has to do differently in order to make this possible. More plates will have to be put on the press and The Courier will have to make more films, but it is in the agreement, Grey said.

However, production will be easier because The Nicholls Worth has the opportunity to send the pages electronically. This means a staff member does not have to drive the pages on disk to The Courier.

“We have an FTP web site, and that all you do when you get through producing your page is send the post script version of that page to our FTP site, and we download it when we are ready for processing,” Grey said.

This will be more efficient because there will be a lesser chance for mistakes, he said.

“I think with a color picture on the front page, you have the opportunity to make the cover look more of a magazine look if you choose,” Grey said.

“Anything that you can do on your computer is open to you. It could be not only a photograph, but the Nicholls logo or something like that,” he said.

“It is an opportunity for both of us to win,” Grey said.

“I give the paper some color, but it moves into a slot where I do not have to bring people in here at 3 a.m. to produce the paper. It saves me money, and I pass it on to ya’ll and the staff ends up with a better looking paper.”

Grey said by adding the color, it gives The Nicholls Worth an opportunity to excel in producing a school paper.

“There are not that many of the college papers that I have seen that run color every week. They can’t afford it, and we are trying to make it a little more affordable,” Grey said.

“It makes all the difference in the world. It gives the paper curb appeal at the rack. You want to reach out and grab that paper.”

The Nicholls Worth staff has been looking into having color for a long time, Aime Gauchet, The Nicholls Worth editor, said.

“We did not see how we would be able to get it without selling full-color ads, on the back page. In the past, it was the only way to do it,” she said.

“But when someone presents you with the opportunity to have full-color on the front page for free, then you want to jump at it.”

Gauchet said it won’t change the quality of the content of the paper, but the overall appeal of it.

“We will be able to do a lot more with color photos and layout, and it won’t look as boring. It will look more festive,” she said.

The Nicholls Worth started with color last week.

“We felt that the only way to truly portray the magnitude of last Tuesday’s events was to have it in color,” Gauchet said.

Nicki Boudreaux, director of student publications, said last week’s color made The Nicholls Worth more noticeable.

“Everyone has been commenting on it, and I think it looked great,” she said.

The Nicholls Worth staff decided that if it could put out a color issue on short notice, then it could definitely do it if it was planned, Gauchet said.

“However, things will happen. Things we can’t control, like technical errors, or people having things to do and not being able to get their stories in on deadline. So yeah, some weeks we will go back to black and white, but our goal is to go to color every week from here on out,” she said.

Most college papers do have color in some capacity, whether it is just the name at the top of the page, or graphics or full color, Gauchet said.

“We felt that it was time to move on into color, and now it is free,” she said.

Boudreaux said it will make The Nicholls Worth a little more respected, and people will probably pick it up and read it more, just because it catches their eye and has attractive design.

“I think it will give us a lot of flexibility in design, a lot of flexibility in graphics, having color photography. I think that all of those things are definitely positive, and will help The Nicholls Worth grow into an even more professional publication,” she said.

There is only one problem that the paper seems to be facing when wanting color on the front page.

“The Student Government Association holds its weekly meeting at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, and our deadline to have the paper to The Courier to get full color is 3 p.m.,” Gauchet said.

“There is no way that we can actually get the story in for that deadline. So, what we have decided to do is post the story on our webpage every week. That way, we can get a little extra traffic to the site.”

This is beneficial because College Publisher, the company that hosts the website, has contests where the paper can win things like digital cameras, she said.

This is done through the newspaper’s webpage hits, number of registered users and other methods as well.

Many other papers will have stories that are exclusive to their website to make an incentive for people to go to that site.

“Many papers have tried, and found it to be effective in getting traffic to their website,” Gauchet said.

The Nicholls Worth will still cover the SGA meeting, and the information will still be there for anyone to see.

“We are looking at this as sort of a compromise. They will still get their coverage, and we can still get our discount and color,” Gauchet said.

The Nicholls Worth adviser also has her own concerns that come along with getting full cover.

“I love having full color on the front page. I think it really does a lot for the paper. The only concern that I have is to make sure that we do not sacrifice newsworthiness for color,” Boudreaux said.

Campus organizations, such as The Nicholls Worth, are suffering because the fees were not raised. So, there was no extra money to use towards purchasing things for the department.

“We had to up our ad percentage to 50 percent. Half of our page has to be ads now in order to save on printing costs because the more pages we have, the more it costs us,” Gauchet said.

Internal deadlines will have to change, but have not been finalized.

“As of right now, we are going to keep the writing deadlines the same, until we see that maybe we need to move it up, but if we do move the date up, we will make the assignments go out a day earlier just to account for that lost 24 hours of time,” Gauchet said.

All the editing will be completed earlier, and the layout for the paper will have to be done sooner.

Photographs will have to be scanned, developed and taken a little bit earlier.

“It is going to be a little getting used to, but we have a pretty fresh staff, and they are all pretty new at this. The ones who have been here, myself included, they are a little less more open to change,” Gauchet said.

Deadlines for letters to the editor wi
ll not change.

Gauchet commented on the full color, and the impact it has on her.

“I am excited about this. It is something I have worked for and I am just glad I got to see it before I graduated. It has been a dream. I have always wanted color,” she said.

Gauchet said she hopes the color will help with flexibility in design, and ultimately towards winning the Pacemaker Award, which is the highest award given to a college paper.

“Right now, we are stuck at All-American. Maybe the future staffs can take us up to that level. I am just happy to give them that little push,” she said.