Vocab Lesson 16: the Wall

Pink Floyd's. The Berlin. Your Facebook one. The word wall conjures up lots of associations, and we've got one to add to the list...


If you've been reading any intern or entry-level job postings for the magazine world, you've likely found that maintaining the wall would be a part of the job. In fact, even in last week's Good Housekeeping intern job posting, they include "updating the mock-up wall" as part of the job description. So what is this wall, you ask?

Well, at Inc. magazine, it's this...

and at the New York Times Magazine, it's this...

and at Popular Mechanics, as our Pub Crawl students saw, it's this...

and at People magazine, it's the photo at the top of the post, and this...

and this....

Most publications maintain a wall of pages like these shown above: printouts of the current issue's pages (and sometimes the ads too) are pinned on the wall in a grid formation, in page order, so the staff can see the entire issue in one big glance. This helps with the pacing of the magazine (how the whole issue flows), and it keeps everyone up-to-date on the status of the pages. It also helps the staff find any possible conflicts or similarities between consecutive stories or with ads: if the design or content of the editorial page looks too similar to the ad or the previous editorial page, they may try to switch them around for better variety. 

If it's your job to update the wall, you'd be in charge of making sure all the pages are the most current versions, and that could include printing and cutting each page to size, and moving them around as needed to match the flatplan.

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Want more? Check out our previous Vocab Lessons here.

"Vocab Lesson" is a recurring feature on our SPD Student Blog. Tune in every Wednesday for a new word of the week. And if you come across a term you can't quite figure out, email it to us at spdstudentoutreach@gmail.com and we'll define it in a future post.