Book review: “The Subversive Copy Editor”
The News & Observer has kindly published my review of “The Subversive Copy Editor,” a book by Carol Fisher Saller. Here’s the blurb-able part of the review:
Saller’s point of view is clearly that of an editor who works for an academic press. Yet her straightforward, sometimes witty, approach will benefit anyone who spends time writing or editing — something many of us do in the workplace every day.
Read the full review here, and visit the book’s official site.
Reuters puts stylebook (and more) online
The Reuters news service has put its Handbook of Journalism online for all to see. It includes what American editors would call a stylebook as well as general advice on reporting and editing.
Here are a few highlights:
On using Wikipedia: “Do not link to Wikipedia or similar collaborative encyclopedia sites as a source of background information on any topic. More suitable sites can almost always be found, and indeed are often flagged at the bottom of Wikipedia entries.
On covering cricket: “Correspondents should write a story at lunch (200 words) and update at tea.”
On listening to readers’ complaints: “As an underlying principle, remember throughout the process of dealing with complaints that attitude counts.”
Copy editors are storytellers too
Pam Robinson at Words at Work has taken note of yet another article about the future of newspapers. This piece, posted on The Moderate Voice, mentions some ill-considered advice from an editor at a New Jersey newspaper:
Restructure the newsroom. Half of the journalists are involved in the “processing” of news — copy editing, writing captions, laying out pages — as opposed to the generation of journalism. Concentrate on journalism that matters. And “focus on good writing. Tales well told.”
Robinson smacks down this argument, pointing out the valuable rewriting and fact checking that copy editors do. (It’s a point also made in a widely discussed column by the Washington Post’s ombudsman.) Robinson also mentions the necessity of production — copy editors and page designers are the ones who put the pieces together for print media. If they don’t do that, who will?
I’d like to build on Robinson’s response and suggest that copy editors are journalists, or “storytellers.” Here’s how:
- Copy editors write cutlines. Most photographs need explanation and detail that link them to the text they go with. In standalone photos in print and in slideshows, the captions and images must work together to tell a story. Either way, copy editors make that connection.
- Copy editors are experts on story structures. That makes us essential in deciding what form best matches the stories we are trying to tell.
- Copy editors write headlines, which both reflect the story text they accompany and tell stories on their own. Indeed, many headlines are just as memorable as the stories themselves, if not more so.
These are just three ways that copy editors are storytellers. We are journalists, just like the reporters, photographers and page designers in any newsroom. We believe in the importance of “tales well told” as much as our colleagues do.
In short, we generate plenty of journalism. Is that so hard to see?
Q&A with Chrys Wu, editorial strategist
Chrys Wu is a journalist and editorial strategist who specializes in connecting users and media outlets. Her reporting and editing work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and online, including the Los Angeles Times and LATimes.com, washingtonpost.com, National Geographic Traveler, KCRW.com and WNYC.org.
Wu blogs at Ricochet, and you can follow her on Twitter. In this interview, conducted by e-mail, Wu discusses what she does, how newspapers use social media and what the future may hold for journalism.
Q. You describe yourself as a social media and multiplatform content strategist. What does that work entail?
A. I help media outlets answer questions: How do we engage our audience? What are our best bets to do that given our resources? How do we reach our business goals while honoring our editorial mission? What can we do to shape the future — not just for the company, but for the industry?
Q. How has your experience as a copy editor informed your current work and other aspects of your career?
A. As a copy editor, I saw my role as the reporter’s champion and the end user’s advocate. My goals were to deeply understand the story, question any holes, and shape the content into something informative (and, when appropriate, fun) for the end user.
I was lucky to have direct access to the people who originated the content, whether they called themselves reporters, designers, journalists, photographers or bloggers. Not only did that give me broad exposure to lots of different stories and storytelling methods, I learned how different people work, think, see and hear. That’s been very informative, and it’s helped me be more rigorous and flexible in my own approach to problem solving.
Q. Newspapers have increased their use of social media to attract and engage readers. What are they doing well, and what could they do better?
A. In general, reporters, bloggers and editors have been doing a good job of using social media tools to reach readers where they spend their time. Some have been better than others at humanizing themselves and giving people a window into the news gathering processes.
Q. As the traditional media struggle financially, what do you think the future holds for news?
A. If we were doing this as a phone or in-person interview, I’d be laughing right now. There will always be news.
What I think you’re asking, though, is what the future holds for news as an industry. To really address the question, I’d write a treatise based on P&L sheets, behavioral economics, market projections, societal values and competitive pressures.
But briefly, I think in the U.S. and other places with widespread Internet access, we’ll see brand names in news shed more workers. We’ll probably see more papers go Chapter 13, more TV stations cut news shows, and more towns lose newspapers altogether, at least in physical form. But there will always be something to take its place.
One of the bad trends I’ve seen over the years is an increase in “me too” reporting, especially in celebrity news. No online outlet wants to give up sure-bet traffic, and frankly, people expect the biggest outlets in town will have those stories. But when everybody has the same story, it becomes overwhelming, especially if there are no new facts in what’s reported. You’ll see more public complaint about that. As for what news outlets will do, it’ll depend on whether or not management is willing to embrace linking.
We’ll probably see more news sites turning to blog formats to display their content. You’ll see fewer big investigative pieces, but more crowdsourcing of small ones and wrap-up reporting to pull those bits into “the story so far” overviews.
The smart organizations will figure out which beats to cover and figure out ways to fill gaps. And I think that’ll come from buying content, or collaborating with other reporting organizations, reporting startups and public efforts.
We’ve already started to see news outlets change the way they break news, and I think that’ll continue. But if you want to be taken seriously as a news source, it’s more important to be accurate than first. Yes, you want to be fast for all sorts of reasons, so if all you’ve got is one rock-solid sentence, get that out there. After all, online and on mobile, you can constantly update what you’re sending out.
Even if copy-editing jobs disappear (which, sadly, I think they will), a copy editor’s skills of critical thinking, synthesis, analysis and fast writing coupled with general and specialist knowledge will be very valuable assets to any organization, particularly when it comes to breaking news and investigative reporting.
Vacation, all I ever wanted
This blog will be on hiatus for the next 10 days as I go on a family vacation. Thanks for visiting, and see you in July.
Should we talk about the weather?
The News & Observer is shrinking its weather coverage.
For years, the Raleigh paper has devoted the top half of the back page of the local section to the weather. That has included color maps of North Carolina and the United States as well as the forecasts and data such as the ocean temperatures.
The paper wants reader feedback on the changes, posting a prototype of what the new weather package could look like. Here’s my reaction:
THE GOOD
- The previously cluttered U.S. map is cleaned up and attractively presented.
- The forecast is concise and easy to read.
- The old page’s redundancy has been eliminated. No longer are Newark and New York listed separately, or Greenville and Spartanburg, S.C.
THE NOT SO GOOD
- Orlando, Las Vegas and Myrtle Beach are major tourist destinations, but they don’t appear anywhere on this page. This is especially odd considering that El Paso and Billings made the cut.
- The map locates Charlotte but not Raleigh. Indeed, the weather package lists Charlotte in the list of national temperatures and in the list of state temperatures. Is this another example of Charlotte creep in the N&O?
The larger question, of course, is whether the weather in print makes sense anymore. Like the stock listings, weather information in print can suffer from staleness.
In Greensboro, the News & Record has reduced its weather package in a more dramatic way, eliminating the map and the list of temperatures from around the world. A few readers complained, but not many. Perhaps that’s indicative of a change in the way people get this type of news.
It’s easy to get weather information online or “on the 8s” on The Weather Channel. A weather page in print and the meterologist/personality on the 6 o’clock news seem like anachronisms.
Google goes tabloid with Weekly World News archive
When the Weekly World News stopped publishing in 2007, the legitimate media noted its demise. No more headlines about Bigfoot, space aliens and miracle cures. No more Bat Boy.
Now, the people at Google Books have created an archive of the supermarket tabloid for all to enjoy. The searchable collection offers full issues of the newspaper from 1980 through 2007.
It’s interesting to see the evolution of the Weekly World News as it moved from celebrities to the supernatural. (That’s Catherine “Daisy Duke” Bach on the front page on the left.) The paper’s experiments with color on the front page and its increased use of doctored images are there to see as well.
It’s also entertaining to skim through the paper’s exclamatory, all-caps headlines, which amount to an alternative reality that may be more interesting than our own. Here’s a sampling:
- ELVIS VISITS HIS NEW GRANDSON!
- SPACE ALIEN MEETS WITH ROSS PEROT!
- FAT IS CONTAGIOUS!
- ANGRY TRUCKER FIRES 5 BULLETS INTO UFO!
- BAT BOY LED OUR TROOPS TO SADDAM’S HOLE!
So what did in the print version of the Weekly World News? (It still exists online, but just barely.) My guess is The Onion, which took the idea of fake news in newspaper form to a more sophisticated level. It turns out that its focus on the mundane is more amusing than the preposterous.
Playing with style: LEGO or Lego?
A recent letter to the editor took The News & Observer to task for the way it refers to this toy. The writer asserts that the proper way to refer to those colorful building blocks is LEGO. She also says that the plural form of LEGO is LEGO.
Not so fast, says my colleague Bill Cloud. He points to an entry in the AP Stylebook. Under “company names,” the stylebook advises: “Do not use all-capital-letter names unless the letters are individually pronounced.” So BMW, but not IKEA. Cloud argues that the style rule on company names should also apply to product names.
Some newspapers have their own style, of course, but The New York Times and Los Angeles Times are with AP on this one. Indeed, that’s how the LAT topics page on the toy does it.
Here’s what Henry Fuhrmann, assistant managing editor in charge of copy desks, standards and the library at the LAT, said in an e-mail about this question:
We do not have a formal style on the word itself. But our general style rule on acronyms would call for Lego. We capitalize the first letter of trademarks but otherwise follow our style rules in determining the capitalization of other letters. Similarly, in our style, NASA and ACLU are all caps, but the California Public Employees Retirement System is CalPERS.
Fuhrmann also said that a former colleague at the LAT would correct those who stuck an “s” on the word: “He is a traditionalist and a stickler and would always gently advise users that ‘Legos’ is incorrect.”
What do you think? Check out this discussion among Lego/LEGO fans for more.
(Creative Commons image by Craig Rodway)
When you search, please be good
GoodSearch is a search engine that donates 50 percent of its advertising revenues to charities designated by its users. It works like any other search engine, with Yahoo providing the results.
The American Copy Editors Society is raising money for its education fund using the site and its companion, GoodShop. That fund supports scholarships to students who are interested in careers in editing.
“Every time you use GoodSearch, the fund will get about a penny,” says Chris Wienandt, president of ACES. “If all 635 ACES members used the service to conduct an average of two searches a day (how hard is that for a copy editor?), the fund would earn about $3,300 a year.”
Next time you need to search for something online, consider using Goodsearch and selecting ACES as the recipient. Thank you for your support.
Q&A with David Millsaps, publisher of New Raleigh
New Raleigh is a news blog that focuses on life, politics and culture in North Carolina’s capital. In this interview, conducted by e-mail, publisher David Millsaps discusses the site’s objectives, editing process and outlook.
Q. What is the purpose of the New Raleigh site?
A. New Raleigh informs a downtown audience about what is going on with downtown businesses, city government, persons of interests and cultural events. The site reaches an audience that wants a discriminating opinion on local current events and insider information on the different people and factors affecting the growth and evolution of the city.
Q. The Triangle has a crowded media market. How does New Raleigh fit in with heavy hitters like WRAL.com and newsobserver.com?
A. New Raleigh is the largest independent publication in Raleigh. We often break stories weeks before the “heavy hitters” and are often driving the conversations that both of these outlets highlight on their own Web sites or other formats. WRAL has gone so far as to show our site on their newscast multiple times, referencing conversations or articles on our site, but never our logo or name. The News & Observer isn’t much better — referring to our content as “essays on the Internet.” If we are significant enough to be part of their stories, we deserve proper citation. When our stories are more blog-like based around those outlets’ stories, we are sure to provide proper links back to the source material.
I think our rapid growth and strong influence has intimidated the old media outlets. Our focus on local content and the fact that our staff is integrated into the communities that they are writing about — those are tough things for those outlets to duplicate. Clearly everyone is strategizing about what’s next, but what I don’t see much of is an understanding of what’s now. Any media outlet should have a cohesive strategy for using the tools that information consumers are using. What I see from the big outlets is a lumbering effort at tech that is already passe.
Q. How does headline writing and story editing work at the site?
A. We have a basic strategy for headlines. Writers generally will suggest one, and then we may revise it based on our internal style. Longer stories are usually edited by one or more editors with our software managing that process and draft system. We use a variety of online tools to communicate throughout this process.
Q. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to make online journalism profitable, or at least sustainable. How does New Raleigh plan to thrive in the coming years?
A. The first thing we are doing is not trying to follow any of the existing models. I do believe in the possibility of a sustainable market-driven model for local news production. I see everyone trying to preserve the old models, and while I would hate to see the N&O die — in many ways they already have, as they have lost so many and so much of what made it great. Others believe in a non-profit or donation-based news format, but to me, this is a Band-Aid for a sliced jugular.
New Raleigh has worked to build a strong audience and the type of information network that can help us inform our audience. As we refine our processes and build new offerings, all of that is in an effort to create something new that can be monetized without sacrificing the traditional tenets of journalism. So while we strive to have the same standards of traditional news, we are also throwing out the costly or inefficient processes that are killing them.
You are going to see New Raleigh grow and adapt as new forms of media evolve. I think you are going to see opportunity in things like these nascent networks like FriendFeed and Google Wave that was previewed a few weeks ago and other new communication like it. Keeping an open mind to new platforms has got to be the key to survival. With the rate of change in information technology accelerating, assuming that things will stay the same is the worst way to survive.
