The lab paper - The Fourth Estate in English and Jalakam in Malayalam - that the students are required to produce on their own every week without fail, is the main vehicle for their training at MASCOM. It includes all areas of newspaper work: collecting information, putting it together in the form of news stories, taking photographs needed for these stories, editing the stories and the photographs, writing headlines and laying out pages. For the lab paper, students take turns to be the Editor, Sub-editors and Reporters week after week, which provides them a medium to put into practice what they are taught in the classroom. Several hundred copies of this paper are printed and distributed to important persons and establishments. The publication of the paper begins each week with an editorial conference where the Editor justifies his or her selection of stories offered by the reporters. In the week following publication, there is a rigorous critique of it by the faculty. The production begins with dummy issues towards the end of the first trimester and the first regular issue is published from the beginning of the second trimester.