Galley, then page

How a story moves from a long strip of text to a page with a number on it.

Issue

September 2026

Section

Filed

Reading

1 min read

A rolled newspaper tucked into the handle of a white panelled shop door.

A galley is the story before it has a place. It runs long, in one column, with no headline and no page number.

Finding a place

Layout gives the galley a width and a neighbour. Only then does a story start to look like part of a newspaper rather than a document.

The last step is the page number, the one detail every reader relies on and nobody reads.