Halloween At AMI

October 31, 2024, at home

Here we are, the copy desk editors of Globe and National Examiner magazines, wearing wigs in our newsroom in Boca Raton, Florida, in celebration of Halloween on Friday, October 30, 2009. Of course, that's me on the right, wearing my "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" T-shirt. The woman in the boa (in the back, center) is not wearing a wig.

From 2002 to 2011, I was a copy editor / page designer for American Media Inc., which publishes the supermarket / gossip weekly tabloids. During those nine years, I edited and designed many pages every week for Star, Globe, National Examiner, and National Enquirer magazines.

In the lower photo, behind me on the wall are small printed pages of the issue of Globe magazine that we were in the midst of completing. We had an 8 p.m. final deadline for Globe magazine every Friday. We had a 6 p.m. final deadline for National Examiner every Wednesday.

We worked on the pages of both of those magazines at the same time, so we had lots of work and lots of fun. The magazines had different formats and somewhat different styles, so one of my many challenges was applying the proper criteria to the proper page.

For examples, the widths of the text columns were different, with Globe being slightly wider than National Examiner, and Globe required spaces before and after ellipses, while National Examiner did not.