What this template is

A school paper has one problem no other kind has: it is made by people who have never made one before, usually in a lunch hour, and it has to be finished by a date somebody else chose. Everything in this template exists to remove a decision from that hour. The masthead is already the right size for the page. The columns are already the width a reader can follow. The margin is already the one the printer asked for. What is left is deciding what goes in it, which is the part students should be spending the hour on.

The front page carries a lead story across four of the five columns, with a picture and an Inside this issue box on the outside rail, and three short items along the foot. That last row matters more than it looks: results, notices and thank yous are what make people take a copy home, and giving them a fixed home on the page stops them being squeezed out when the lead story runs long.

How to fill it in

Fill it in this order and it goes quickly. Choose the lead first, because everything else is sized around it. Write the headline before the article, in no more than eight words, and if you cannot say what the story is in eight words it is probably two stories. Then write the standfirst, the italic line under the headline, as one sentence explaining why a reader who is not involved should care.

Bylines are worth more to a school paper than to any other kind. Put the writer's name and year group on every piece, including the short ones. It is the single thing that makes students want to write the next issue, and it costs one line.

For photographs, name everyone left to right in the caption and check your school's policy on which pupils may be pictured before you send anything to a printer. That check is not a formality and it cannot be undone once a hundred copies exist.

What usually goes wrong

Three things go wrong with school papers, and all three are avoidable. The first is the page count. Most of these formats print in multiples of four, so a paper that has grown to six pages has to become eight or shrink to four, and finding that out on the morning of the deadline is miserable. Decide the page count in the first week and commission to fill it.

The second is photographs from phones sent over messaging apps, which compress them to a fraction of their original size. A picture that looks sharp on a phone can be well under what the press needs at the size you are printing it. Collect originals, not forwards, and run them through the image checker before you place them.

The third is leaving placeholder text in. Every line of filler in this template says it is filler, on purpose, so that a paragraph nobody replaced is obvious in a proof rather than convincing.

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.