Special section schedule
Your rate card might also contain a listing of your yearly special sections that come out once or twice a year, such as a bridal section or a health and fitness section. If not, there will be a separate schedule you'll want to get your hands on.

Column widths
Another extremely useful thing in the rate card is the exact width of your columns. You'd think that if a column in your newspaper is 2 and a 1/4 inches wide that all you'd have to do is double it to determine a two column ad. But just as with editorial pages, there's a small space between each column, usually about an eighth of an inch. So a two column ad is twice the width of a one column ad, plus an eighth of an inch. Because of this, it's good to keep a rate card near at all times so you can convert any column width to its inch width equivalent quickly for an advertiser.

Line screens
The rate card will also tell you the line screen requirements of any photographs in the ad. If you look closely at every photograph in a newspaper, magazine, or any printed piece except an actual photograph, you'll notice it's broken into a pattern of dots. The better quality of the paper, the finer the dots can be. Because newsprint isn't the highest quality paper out there, the spaces between the dots have to be bigger or the dots will bleed into one another. That's why a newspaper has a fairly noticeable dot pattern or screen.

It's called a screen because it used to be produced by laying an actual screen over the photographic paper before it's exposed. Most likely your newspaper has an 85 line screen and any magazine your might print on glossy paper would be 133. Check your rate card for your paper's exact line screen. You won't have to worry about this if your art department is putting the ad together from original artwork.