Today, The Hillgrove Files Board and Senior Leadership Team (BaSLT) has finalised the 2024 Hillgrove Files Word Cloud, capturing the zeit and geist of what some are calling the most tumultuous but entertaining annum yet.
For what is a newspaper, if not a cloud of words??
But how does a bustling news-house go about creating such a vital and bold cultural artefact, a veritable Voyager Golden Disk for square-eyed netizens – sweatily clamouring for current affairs? Well, O curious one, take a look inside the mage’s drapes.
Many hands make light word clouds
Such a campaign couldn’t conclude without the combined mastery of a storied regiment of news-hardened press veterans.
The word cloud work stream, known internally as Project Nimbus, was ploughed relentlessly forward by a crack team of 20-40 key stakeholders, imagineers, and dogsbodies – among them Editor Consort Richman Hillgrove, Ayatollah of the Printing Press Alan Jones, Director of Agitprop Sam Hain, Vice President of Kerning Gareth Gates, Office Politics Coordinator Kristie Sergeant, and Junior Junior Marketing Assistant Roy Miles.
With such a dynamic team kettled together for days at a time, there are bound to be polite strategy disagreements, if not occasional violent scuffles. Indeed, amiable disputes over the word cloud led to a complete reshuffle of the board and several resignations in the Senior Leadership Coven, as reported by local gossip rag The Lakewood Papers. Frankly though, we don’t think that was any of their business.
Nevertheless, the steady hand of Richman Hillgrove EC was able to steer the good ship Hillgrove through the rocky seas of conflict and journalistic subterfuge, and into the stable harbour of success.
O the wild charge they made
By February ’24 the team were able to agree that the cloud would consist at least primarily of text – and mere months afterwards a shortlist of 800 candidate words was compiled. The team were able to dynamically adapt to market conditions – by November ’24 initial plans for a granite monolith were scaled back in an agile manner in response to tapering budget availability, opting instead for a more future-facing digital graphic.
Ultimately, the wisdom of the crowds was harnessed, and the project team were able to publish the word cloud only 10 months late in October 2025.
The sense of an ending
The final design includes multiple words; “Words” was included twice for emphasis, reflecting the primary medium of the business. The three colours of taupe, sage and aubergine were chosen to represent the three Core Values of the Hillgrove Files: Temperance, Truth and Words.
The word “amends” was also accidentally included by our graphic designer, but the graphic already had final sign-off, so the decision was made to leave it in place.
Hillgrove Files Chief Editorialiser Richman Hillgrove was “tickled pink” with the team’s tireless work over the course of the 20 month project, and has already announced the start of Project Cumulus, aiming to produce a new word cloud that will commemorate the glowing success of the project.
