What this template is
Community papers are read differently from every other kind. Nobody sits down with one; they pick it up off a counter, look for a name they know, and put it down again. The layout here is built around that. The lead story takes the width it deserves, but the outside rail carries a What's on box that a reader can find in two seconds, and the foot of the page is given over to short items, which is where the notices, the results and the thank yous live.
The inside page is a straightforward two-story spread with a picture and a pull quote, which is the format most local news actually fits. A long piece at the top, something shorter underneath, and one line lifted out and set large so the page has somewhere for the eye to rest.
How to fill it in
The single most valuable thing in a community paper is a date with a place next to it. Before you write anything, fill the What's on box, because that is what gets the paper carried home and pinned up. Then write the lead, and remember that a lead in a local paper is usually a decision that affects people rather than an event that happened.
Advertising, if you are selling any, belongs in a fixed place rather than wherever there is room. The sidebar box on the front and the bottom of the inside page are the two positions advertisers will pay for, and quoting a fixed size makes selling much easier than negotiating each one.
Name people. A community paper that names forty residents will be read by four hundred; one that names nobody will be read by the person who wrote it.
What usually goes wrong
The most common mistake is writing at the length you would write online. A column here holds roughly a hundred and forty words. A thousand-word piece is seven columns, which is most of a page, and it will not be finished by anyone. Aim for three hundred words for the lead and a hundred for everything else.
The second is distribution nobody planned. Decide before you print where the copies are going and who is carrying them, because a print run sitting in somebody's hallway is the usual way a first issue becomes the only issue.
The third is a page count chosen after the writing. Fix it first; the printers here mostly work in multiples of four.
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.