What this template is
A parish paper is mostly notices, and notices are what this layout is built around. The front page carries a modest lead story rather than a dominant one, a services box in the top of the outside rail where anybody can find it without reading, and then a ruled grid of short items filling the lower half. That grid is the heart of it: eight or nine separate notices, each with a headline, each visually separate, none of them buried.
The inside page is a letter and a diary. One longer piece, which is usually a letter from the minister, and a second section for dates, with a pull quote to break the grey.
How to fill it in
Fill the services box first and check it against the calendar for the whole period the paper covers. A wrong service time in print is the one error that sends somebody to a locked building.
Short items should each have a name and a way to reach that person. A notice that says a rota needs volunteers and does not say who to speak to produces no volunteers.
For the lead, prefer something with a number in it. Appeals, totals, attendance, the state of the roof: a congregation reads progress far more readily than reflection, and the reflection has the inside page.
What usually goes wrong
Two things go wrong. The first is length: a letter written for reading aloud runs to eight hundred words and fills most of an inside page, leaving the diary squeezed. Ask for four hundred.
The second is photographs of the building. Every parish paper is tempted, and no photograph of a church has ever made anybody come to it. Photograph people doing something, with their permission, and name them.
If your newsletter carries advertising from local businesses, which many do to cover the print bill, keep those to a fixed size and a fixed position so the layout does not have to be redrawn every issue.
Opening and editing the files
The PDF holds both pages and is the one to look at first. It is drawn at the exact document size for the format you chose, so printing it at a hundred percent gives you a true proof of the layout. Use it to check the design before you commit to editing anything.
The two SVGs are the editable version. Every headline, caption and paragraph is real text rather than an outline, so you can click into it and type. They open in Inkscape, which is free, and in Illustrator, Affinity Designer and Figma. The photograph placeholders are plain rectangles; delete one and put your own picture in its place, keeping to the same box so the text around it does not have to move.
The template is set in the standard PDF serif and sans faces, which is deliberate: they are the faces that exist everywhere, so the file looks the same on your machine as it does on ours and on the printer's. If you would rather use something else, the guide to newsprint fonts covers what survives at small sizes on absorbent paper, which is a narrower field than it looks.
Before you order
Check the page count rule for the format you have chosen. Most of the printers here work in multiples of four, one works in multiples of eight, and one publishes no rule at all. The margin and safe area calculator will check a page count against a format, and the format's own specification page carries the full rules on colour, resolution and export settings.
Check your photographs at the size you are actually printing them rather than at the size they look on screen. The image DPI checker gives you the effective resolution and tells you the largest a picture can safely go. Newsprint is absorbent and loses fine detail, so a photograph that is marginal on screen will be worse on paper.
Then export a proof PDF and run it through your printer's own preflight before you pay for anything. Every figure in this template came from that printer's published guidelines on the date shown below, but presses vary and guidelines get revised.
About the photographs
The pictures in these templates are placeholders and you are meant to replace them. They are here because a template with an empty grey box does not show you what your paper will look like, and because a page with a photograph on it is laid out differently from one without.
Every one is public domain or CC0, taken from Wikimedia Commons, and the build refuses any image whose licence asks for attribution. That rule exists for your sake rather than ours: an attribution requirement cannot survive somebody opening the file, deleting a caption and sending it to a press. So if you print these pages exactly as they are, including commercially, you owe nobody anything. The sources are listed anyway, because you should be able to check rather than take our word for it.
Figures on this page come from Newspaper Club artwork guidelines, read on 2026-08-20. Presses vary and printers revise their guidelines, so run a test PDF through their own preflight before you order.