Q&A with Sapna Maheshwari of BuzzFeed

Sapna Maheshwari is a business reporter for BuzzFeed. Prior to that job, she worked at Bloomberg News. In this interview, conducted by email, Maheshwari discusses her beat, her recent career transition and BuzzFeed’s new business section.

Q. Describe your job. What is your typical workday like?

A. My job is to write about retail for BuzzFeed’s new business news section. My typical workday is a lot like it used to be — reading analyst reports, talking with sources, contacting companies, reading filings and so on. I spend a bit more time on Twitter and other social networks than I used to, looking for information on the companies I cover in those spheres.

Q. Why is BuzzFeed, known for its animal photos and “listicles,” going into business journalism?

A. BuzzFeed has been expanding its news coverage for quite some time — especially in politics, where the team there has really made a name for itself.

Business news is a big part of the social conversation. Clearly, it’s something people care about and talk about. We’re a small team but think we can write smart scoops and analysis about business that people want to read and share.

For my beat, retail, it’s an obvious fit: writing about the businesses that people shop at and interact with on a daily basis. Our goal is for everything on the vertical to be funny or exclusive, and hopefully, we’re hitting that goal so far.

Q. You previously worked at Bloomberg News. What has it been like to go from the Bloomberg Way to BuzzFeed? What are the differences in reporting, writing and editing?

A. It’s very different. At Bloomberg, the writing was more formulaic, and my audience was typically investors or traders, except when I was writing feature-type stories for Businessweek. I also had more editors, and the fact-checking was more rigorous. I had to put in a ticket to get a photo attached to a story.

Here at BuzzFeed, it’s obviously a smaller operation. I can put together the posts myself, and it goes out much quicker. We’re also not writing up earnings stories and stock moves, so I can spend more time reporting and researching.

That said, the reporting itself is largely similar, but I have less data at my fingertips without a Bloomberg terminal. Working at Bloomberg for so long definitely made me a fair and careful reporter, though, and I’m so glad I started my career there.

Q. You graduated from the UNC School of Journalism in 2009. What is the most important thing you learned there, and what new skills have you had to pick up since college?

A. Wow, hard to pick out the most important thing I learned at the j-school. I’m definitely extra careful with facts and spelling thanks to my classes there.

I think one of the most important things I took away was from my business and the media class — learning about the role of PR in business journalism and how the two fields can work together despite often having different goals. I have always kept to the rule that a story shouldn’t be a “surprise” for a company and that transparency from my end goes a long way in building trust with them. Having so many friends that went the PR route in the j-school reinforced that for me.

As far as new skills, I’ve gotten more adept with company filings and using social networking tools to find sources for stories. I also became a bit of a pro on the Bloomberg terminal after working on one for 3.5 years!

Follow Sapna Maheshwari on Twitter and read her articles on BuzzFeed.

Q&A with Kirk Ross of The Carolina Mercury

Kirk Ross is editor of The Carolina Mercury, a website that focuses on North Carolina news, issues and politics, including the state’s General Assembly. In this interview, conducted by email, Ross talks about the site, his job and online and print journalism.

Q. What is the purpose of The Carolina Mercury as a self-described “filtered aggregator of news with occasional bits of analysis”?

A. Eventually, we want the Mercury to be a mix of longer essays, visual elements (slideshows, video) as well as the shorter posts were doing these days to clue folks about issues and news events. Right now, we’re just trying to keep up with a news cycle that’s in hyperdrive because of the legislative session, so most of our posts are in the shorter style.

I think one of the big problems with aggregators, both the automatic ones and the human-initiated kind, is that they give you little or no context. My favorite new phrase for what we’re trying to do with our shorter posts is “curated aggregation,” and it means not just a link and a pull quote, but adding a reason why the story is important and giving the reader some context by noting previous, related stories as well as doing some taxonomy work.

For the various news feeds and Twitter feeds on the site, we’ve actually done some filtering. The Twitter feeds on the site monitor a mix of individuals, organizations and hashtags. The #NCGA (North Carolina General Assembly) and #NCPOL hashtags can occasionally be dominated by trolls, junk posts and people who keep writing tweet after tweet hyping some ideological view, so we’ve got those tweets filtered out to make the feed a better information tool.

Q. What is your role at the Mercury, and what is your job like from day to day?

A. Like I said, right now it’s a madhouse keeping up with legislation and the General Assembly, so that dominates life at present. I’m covering the legislature for two news organizations, one in the mountains and one on the coast, and have two columns a month on public policy to write as well.

My day starts with seeing what bills have been filed or are on the calendar, reviewing them and letting folks know if there’s something significant coming. The volume is so great at times that it’s all triage.

I either drive to Raleigh or tune into the committee hearings and House and Senate session via the web and blog accordingly. I coordinate with Lucy Butcher, who is the other main reporter/editor at the Mercury, on things that are coming up or what’s breaking. It’s all fairly reactive, which is not my favorite mode to be in, but that’s the news business when things are, well, newsy.

After the session, things will change a bit. I’m going to drive around the state for a while looking for interesting stories that do not include the word “legislation.”

Q. What are some of the challenges of covering the General Assembly and state government in general?

A. Keeping calm and carrying on. No, seriously, that is a big part of it because a lot of important changes are being pushed through.

There’s a temptation to cover something because it is outrageous, but you have to have some discipline. You can’t let yourself get distracted by every crazy piece of legislation that comes along. You have to stay focused on what actually might become law.

The longer I’ve done this, the more I dislike politics and all the noise that comes with it. I much prefer a good policy tussle.

The hardest thing about the NCGA this session is that there are so many new members. More than half of legislators are in either their first or second term, and at times, it really shows. There’s such a rush to change things that there’s not a lot of time for legislators to really understand what policies are now and why they’re in place before being asked to change them.

The rest of state government in this era of supermajority is a strange beast. The addition of three times as many political appointees and years of worry about having one’s budget slashed has taken a toll.

Nobody wants to get on the radar screen, meaning no one wants to say anything to the press that could bring down some heat. There’s a lot of self-censorship, and I’m not seeing any headway on making things more transparent.

Q. The big question with digital media is financial. How can sites like the Mercury become economically viable?

A. Do good journalism. Break some stories. Don’t let the site meter run your life, or you’ll end up chasing celebrities, pumping up scandals and ignoring stories that actually make a difference in people’s lives.

If you can do these things, you can find an economic model that works whether that’s a tip jar, subscriptions or some big grant. Whatever you do, don’t think you can do it through advertising. It’s been tried.

Q. Previously, you were editor of The Carrboro Citizen. What has the transition from a print-centric publication to an exclusively online entity been like for you, and what advice would you have for journalists looking to make a similar transition?

A. I always told people that one of the great advantages the Citizen had was that I got to integrate the web and print versions from the start. That was enlightening because it got us past the idea of adapting or converting and into a combined creative process.

It changes your writing if you know you’re going to be able to put the full text of a bill at the bottom of a story or be able to quote extensively from a report. You have to consider how to format, how people read online and how they share stories with each other.

I learned how to make newspapers when they were still made out of molten lead and you had to know how to count headlines. That shaped the profession long after offset changed everything.

You still see the same short verbs and slang created by clever editors for single-column stories. The mental exercise of composing a headline under those circumstances always helped me better understand the story I was writing.

Thinking about how you’d tweet something or post it to your Facebook page isn’t something you’re forced to do since that the big, mean Internet took your print publication away. It’s how information flows now and, frankly, it smells a hell of a lot better than those old linotype machines.

Visit the Carolina Mercury on Facebook and follow its Twitter feed.

Student guest post: The question of removing news after publication

Students in JOMC 457, Advanced Editing, are writing guest posts for this blog this semester. This is the second of those posts. Tyler Confoy is a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill studying reporting and philosophy. In the future, she hopes to write features for a monthly, biweekly or weekly publication.

Should editors remove controversial material after it’s been published?

I’ve encountered this question twice in the past few months. Both times, it was posed as a hypothetical, meant to get journalism students thinking about what they might do in a real-world situation.

Many times the question is an ethical one. If no legal problem is involved, the question becomes “Should we remove this?” instead of “Do we have to remove this?” Ultimately, it’s up to the publication.

I’ve encountered journalists who are steadfast in their belief that accuracy is accuracy and that things should rarely be taken down. I’ve heard it explained this way: “If it happened, it happened.” Personally, I tend to side with these journalists. My reasoning is that if you compromise one post, you might start compromising other posts.

I’d like to look into a case that’s been of wide public interest recently. Soon after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting Dec. 14, The Journal News, a newspaper covering New York’s Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties, published interactive maps showing the locations and names of permit holders licensed by Westchester and Rockland counties to own a handgun. The Journal News was able to do this under New York’s Freedom of Information Law.

Responses to the maps were both positive and negative. Many said they were an invasion of permit holders’ privacy. On Jan. 15, New York passed the NY SAFE Act, putting tighter obligations on gun ownership but also allowing more privacy for gun permit holders. On Jan. 18, Janet Hasson, publisher of The Journal News, released a letter saying that the website had removed the maps. (Snapshots of the maps< remain on The Journal News website.)

In the letter, Hasson wrote, “As a news organization, we are constantly defending the public’s right to know. Consequently we do not endorse the way the legislature has chosen to limit public access to gun permit data. … But we are not deaf to voices who have said that new rules should be set for gun permit data.”

Politico reported that in a statement released also on Jan. 18, Hasson said, “While the new law does not require us to remove the data, we believe that doing so complies with its spirit. … We remain committed to our mission of providing the critical public service of championing free speech and open records.”

These two viewpoints put forth by Hasson don’t quite match up. Why would The Journal News believe in complying with the legislation’s spirit — in fact with the portion of the legislation that protects permit holders’ privacy — if it does not agree with limited public access to data concerning permit holders?

In addition to pointing out the new legislation, Hasson defended the maps’ removal by writing that they had already been seen by those who wanted to see them and that eventually the data presented in the maps would change anyway. This seems logical: If the maps were national news, surely they’d been seen by local folks, and surely information changes.

But it seems more like an excuse. Most journalists don’t take something down within a month just because most people who care have seen it, and it’s understood that information changes with time. These maps were a historical part of the Journal News coverage in the midst of a national gun crisis, and they could have remained online.

It is certainly hard to blame Hasson. The Journal News’ writers were being threatened. Home addresses were published. And maybe the new legislation just pressured Hasson to recognize the ethical dilemma that had been there all along (if not by law, at least in theory): the struggle between freedom of the press and the right to privacy. But ultimately this struggle should have been recognized beforehand.

Having the ability to remove published information is a nice safety net, but journalists and publishers should look at every angle of possible reception and take a definite stance before they publish anything — and perhaps especially before they publish something clearly controversial.

The Journal News initially stood by its decision to post the maps. Then it removed the maps. Will it compromise something else next?

Q&A with Reid Serozi of Triangle Wiki

Reid Serozi is a project organizer of Triangle Wiki, an encyclopedia-style website about the Research Triangle region of North Carolina. In this interview, conducted by email, Serozi discusses what’s behind the project and how Triangle residents can contribute to it.

Q. What is the purpose of Triangle Wiki, and what is your role in it?

A. Triangle Wiki is a grassroots, open-source movement powered by LocalWiki software to provide a free, openly editable, community-centric website for local history, media, opinions, interesting characters and everything else about the Triangle region (Raleigh-Durham).

Triangle Wiki may seem old school as it provides a single place on the Web where local knowledge can be documented and preserved for the future. By no means does the Triangle Wiki Web platform feel old school with the powerful editing capabilities and beautiful editable maps that give a sense of place to each wiki page.

My involvement with Triangle Wiki started in 2011 as a project organizer when I pitched the idea to start a local wiki effort to group of talented Raleigh civic geeks. My responsibilities today are spread across contributing content, actively managing an online wiki community, developing marketing campaigns and planting new local wiki communities in the many different towns and universities within the Triangle region.

Q. What advice do you have for people who want to contribute as writers and editors?

A. Ask yourself what things, places or people do you value the most in your community. Those are potential wiki pages you might find yourself having the greatest knowledge of and desire to contribute toward.

Don’t worry about being formal, asking for permission or producing structured content at first. Visit the wiki and make a few edits on existing wiki pages to get your feet wet.

If a page doesn’t exist, then create one and add a photo or a few lines of content to get the page seeded. Share the page with friends and ask them to contribute what they know.

Don’t focus on high-level contributions like a page about Durham. Triangle Wiki is place to capture the many unique, hidden and wonderful things that make the Triangle what it is.

Q. On occasion, Wikipedia has faced criticism regarding its credibility and accuracy. How does Triangle Wiki ensure that it’s a reliable, trustworthy resource?

A. For starters, did I mention anyone can edit Triangle Wiki?

The criticism we hear the most about Wikipedia is the barriers to entry are too high and the contributors are not even from the local area. You will see Raleigh’s Pullen Park Wikipedia page being updated from people in Chicago.

Triangle Wiki is taking a different approach to making sure it’s a reliable resource, which means allowing content to be subject to a crowdsourced hyperlocal forum. The visitors and contributors are gonna be mainly people from the local community. These are your neighbors, public servants and the same people you stop along a greenway to ask for directions. This same audience is going to have a greater incentive to make sure information about their community is helpful for others.

Q. With the rise of social media, we live in an increasingly crowded world of online information. What is the future of the wiki format fit in that environment?

A. Today, local knowledge is easily shared by the minute within a community in the form of fragmented small digital bits for a short attention span audience. The majority of that local knowledge is shared globally across commercially driven digital media services.

The local wiki is noncommercial and built for the long term by local contributors who love their communities. The local wiki space will eventually fill a void for existing and future hyperlocal blog content.

Generally, hyperlocal blogs are geared toward niche audiences focused around a city, town or neighborhood district that tends to be operated by one or two local volunteers. The hyperlocal blog model is not always sustainable.

There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into a frequent published blog, and the authors eventually move on in life. What happens to those outstanding retired online resources? What if we could shift those publishers toward an open, local wiki model where the content and collaborative contributors will continue for life?

Follow Triangle Wiki on Twitter and contribute to the site.

Q&A with Ariel Zirulnick, Middle East editor at the Christian Science Monitor

Ariel Zirulnick is Middle East editor at The Christian Science Monitor. In this interview, conducted by email, she discusses her job, the editing process at the Monitor and how to land a job in international journalism.

Q. Describe your job. What do you do on a typical day?

A. I work from our Boston headquarters, editing copy from a slew of staff writers and freelancers living in North Africa and the Middle East, and occasionally reporting and writing myself.

On a typical day, I wake up around 6 a.m. and immediately check my work email to see if any of my reporters, who are anywhere from 6 to 8 hours ahead of us, have emerging stories or other time-sensitive things on which they need a response. Since they’re already halfway through their day at that point, it’s critical to get them an answer ASAP.

The international desk editors get in to the office at 7:30 a.m. and spend the first couple hours of the day assigning and editing stories, planning coverage, tracking news in our regions, etc. The afternoon, when our reporters are done for the day and heading for bed, is typically the time to catch up on more long-term work, whether it’s magazine stories, non-time sensitive stories for the Web, or just organizational and administrative things, like handling our reporters’ reimbursements for work-related trips.

We spend a lot of time tracking what is rising and falling on Google and Yahoo! news. It isn’t the only thing that dictates our coverage, but it does influence our decisions and it certainly influences the way we write our headlines.

Q. How does story editing and headline writing work at the Monitor?

A. Every story for CSMonitor.com receives two edits.

The first is almost always done by the relevant regional editor, who will edit not only for spelling and grammar, but also for content – ideas, analysis, etc. The first edit is sent back to the reporter for him to answer any questions that came up and to read over the editor’s changes to ensure nothing was changed in such a way that it became incorrect.

Then they send back a fresh file incorporating all the editor’s changes and questions. That version then gets a read from another editor on the international desk – this time mostly for grammar, style, readability, etc. – before being published to the website. Stories for our weekly magazine go through one additional layer of editing with a designated copy editor.

The international desk editors write the headlines for stories on CSMonitor.com. Typically it’s the editor doing the first edit who writes a headline, making sure to incorporate the so-called “key phrases” that Google News clusters are built around in order to get the story into that cluster and get traffic. We run our suggested headline by either the international editor or the deputy international editor, who gives the final stamp of approval.

Q. Readers often see bias in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How do you handle such criticism?

A. I receive more complaints on this than anything else in my region by a landslide. The fact is, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be impossible to satisfy critics – sometimes their objection is not grounded in fact and they will read whatever bias they want to into the piece.

It’s not rare to get two e-mails bashing the same story, one for being too sympathetic to Israelis, one for being too sympathetic to Palestinians. The only thing that’s different is the lens through which each reader is reading the piece. That’s what makes it so hard to satisfy everyone, or even most readers.

We do try to respond to all complaints because we want to make sure readers know we’re paying attention to their comments. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of pointing out to the reader the different voices in the piece to show that the reporter did her due diligence by using sources from across the political spectrum.

If the criticism seems valid – perhaps we forgot to include some background about a source’s political affiliation, or cast something in a certain light that seemed misleading – we will typically write to the person and ask them to provide us with their own sources to back up their claims. Sometimes we find that they can’t, sometimes they can and we file either a correction or, if it doesn’t warrant that, assure them that we will take that into account in future stories on the topic. Often readers are just happy to get an acknowledgement of their complaint, whether or not it prompts any action.

We get complaints the most often when we do a piece on only Israel or only Palestinians, mostly from readers angry that we “ignored” one half of the conflict. In that case, I’ll point them to previous stories that focused exclusively on the other “side.” Even if one piece is not straight down the middle, I can say with confidence that our cumulative work is.

Q. You are a 2010 graduate of the journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill. What advice do you have for students there to get a job like yours?

A. A second major, preferably something with an international slant, is very important if you want to work in international affairs journalism (I double majored in journalism and international studies, with a Middle East focus).

While outlets like CSM are happy when someone has journalism training, we care less about that and more about the reporter’s ability to thing deeply about the topic at hand, synthesize complex information, and see events in their broader context. Knowledge of the region, including its history, is essential for that, and that comes from studying the region, likely in an academic setting. It can be learned in the field, of course, but it’s unlikely an outlet like CSM will take something from a freelancer if they just arrived in the country and have no prior experience or study there.

Studying abroad, and even getting an internship abroad, will also give you a huge leg-up. Getting an international internship overseas is not as unattainable a goal as it sounds – most countries have an English language publication or a bureau for a major US publication, and it’s often much easier to get an internship there than at a news outlet in the United States.

The catch is that they’ll often be unpaid, since they don’t want to go through the hassle of obtaining a work visa for you, but the j-school has many scholarships specifically for covering students’ expenses while doing unpaid internships. That’s how I funded a summer internship at the Jerusalem Post, which I did on the heels of a semester at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (which I also mostly funded with scholarships, in that case from the Global Ed program).

Also, work for the Daily Tar Heel! My work for them is what I used when I applied to my Jerusalem Post internship, and editors there were amazed at the quality of the student-run publication. UNC journalism students are fortunate enough to have a top-notch news outlet around that takes teaching peers very seriously.

Take advantage of it. No journalism school class can simulate the deadline pressures and real-life experiences that you get from writing for the DTH.

If a student wants first and foremost to be reporting overseas, his best bet is to take the leap and set up shop as a freelancer overseas. Do some research into what countries are undercovered (a tip-off is a dateline from a country other than the one the story is about) and move there! You’ll have to pitch like crazy to a number if outlets before you get a bite, but it’s really the best way to go if being overseas is your first priority.

But if, like me, you aren’t comfortable taking that financial risk (student loans!) or care more about being a part of a team than in getting overseas straightaway and having to work solo, you can look into internships with the international sections of newspapers based in the United States.

I got my foot in the door with CSM by taking a semester-long paid internship with the Monitor after graduating from college. You’ll probably spend most of your time editing, not reporting, but you’ll still have your head in international news all day long, and you’ll learn a ton about a lot of places, which will better prepare for a move overseas in the future and maybe even get you in line for a staff position.

I was fortunate to be interning with CSM when a staff position opened up. A year later the Middle East editor position opened up, and now I’m spending my day reading, writing and editing on the region that has enthralled me for years. I even got to take a reporting trip to Egypt and Lebanon last year, which was incredibly exciting.

The Monitor international desk hires an intern each semester and for the summer. If you are interested, or just want to know more, please be in touch! I need people to watch Carolina basketball with up here.

Follow Ariel Zirulnick on Twitter at @azirulnick.

Paywalls and rebates

Last month, my daily newspaper, The News & Observer of Raleigh, launched what it calls N&O Plus. Most people, however, call it a paywall.

The N&O is among more than 400 U.S. newspapers that charge for online content. As a faithful subscriber to the print edition, I can access its digital offerings as before.

The sharp decline of print advertising has led to cuts in staff and resources at newspapers across the United States; the slow rise of digital advertising on news sites is insufficient to make up for that lost revenue. That’s why some news organizations are turning to paywalls.

I’m torn on this issue. Like anyone, I like getting goods and services at the lowest possible cost. I don’t want to pay for something that was free for many years.

But I know that high-quality journalism is expensive to produce, and I am willing to pay to get it. That’s why I subscribe to the N&O and contribute to WUNC-FM, among other expenditures in my media budget.

As my friend and former colleague John Robinson suggested in a blog post last month, newspapers need to offer unique, engaging content to justify charging readers for access to their sites. I’d add that the stories, slideshows and other material behind paywalls need to be well-edited. Readers notice, after all.

To that end, I propose a rebate program that would allow readers to get money back for various editing glitches. Consider it to be a modest proposal.

For purposes of illustration, I’ll use N&O Plus. The digital subscription costs $70 a year. Under the rebate plan, subscribers would get refunds at the end of each year like so:

• Picayune style error (such as canceled vs. cancelled): 1 cent
• Punctuation error: 25 cents
• Repeated or dropped word: 25 cents
• Redundancy, cliche or garble: 25 cents
• Routine spelling error: 50 cents
• Corporate/military/governmental jargon: $1
• Missing first reference to a source: $2
• Misleading chart or map: $3
• Misspelled proper name: $4
• Fact error: $5
• Libel, fabrication or plagiarism: full refund

So how can news sites avoid paying these rebates? Hire more copy editors, and let them do their work.

Q&A with Scott Butterworth, editorial copy chief at The Washington Post

Scott Butterworth is editorial copy chief at The Washington Post. He has also worked as a night editor and copy chief of the newspaper’s Style section. In this Q&A, conducted by email, Butterworth talks about his job managing the Editorial copy desk at the Post.

Q. Describe your job. What is your typical day like?

A. I lead a team of seven multiplatform editors (the Post’s term for what used to be called copy editors) who deal solely with copy from the Editorial department. Collectively, we edit, fact-check, headline and publish some 50 articles daily, material that includes op-eds, columns, editorials, blog postings and letters to the editor.

We staff from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the day begins and ends with blog postings. Editorial has six blogs that are updated several times through the day. Letters to the editor are typically ready for editing by 9 a.m., op-eds and columns beginning at noon, and editorials at 5 p.m. We start laying out the editorial and op-ed newspaper pages at mid-afternoon and distribute proofs by 6:30 p.m. We typeset the pages around 7:30 p.m.

All of this material is published online as soon as it is ready, with one exception: Syndicated columns, which make up the majority of our op-ed pages, are generally embargoed from the Web until 8 p.m.

(Separate from the multiplatform crew, Editorial has a day online editor who triages the incoming copy, monitors what online audiences are gravitating toward and suggests what should be prioritized to address this appetite, and an online producer/editor. Together, they craft a plan for presenting and promoting our pieces.)

My day runs from noon to 8 p.m. Monday to Friday. I assign articles to the MPEs so that we wind up with neither backlogs nor editors twiddling their thumbs, I slot all stories headed into the paper (blog postings are not slotted), and I grab blog postings as I can.

I also handle longer-range duties: managing team members’ performance; looking ahead for opportunities our department should pursue and threats we should mind; and representing the desk in discussions throughout the department and the newsroom.

Q. How is editing opinion pieces different from editing news?

A. The gist of the job is the same: We are the reader’s surrogate. It is our job to untangle clunky or confusing sentences and to clarify what the writer intends to say. We also challenge the facts in each piece with the recurring question: How do you know that?

We follow the guidance of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.” Any good editorial or op-ed is, at its heart, an argument supported by facts. If the foundation proves less than sturdy, the opinion becomes rickety and unpersuasive. So it is in both our interest and the writer’s to ensure that the facts are as she describes them.

The twist in the job comes when the writer segues to her opinions. Our interest in plain speaking continues, but we must take care that, in clearing away brambles, we don’t cut away something more significant. So rather than rewrite first and ask later, as news desks may do on deadline, we raise questions with the writer (often proposing alternative language) and wait for a reply before taking out the shears.

We also aim to channel the writer when writing headlines. The goal is a headline that summarizes the article not only in a like spirit but also in such a way to entice even those who oppose this point of view to read it.

Q. How has the rise of digital media changed headline writing for opinion pieces?

A. It requires us to get to the point quickly — to be direct and descriptive — with our online heads. Often, nuance goes by the boards. Web audiences are hungry for smart, well-founded opinion and analysis, but they do gravitate toward starkly worded headlines, full of superlatives and usually beginning with one of the five W’s or the H.

That recipe can feel mighty limiting sometimes, especially when (for SEO purposes) you add a proper name to the front of the headline and you keep it all to less than 60 characters (at which point Google loses interest). So why do it this way? We don’t always, but we’ve found that resisting this formula creates a headwind in getting online attention.

We encourage our MPEs in writing Web heads to focus less on what happened and more on what it means. Where it makes sense, we also “steal” a writer’s lead or kicker — an approach that is bad manners in print but has proven particularly successful in attracting online aggregators such as the Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics.

Our content management system also allows us to write different headlines for different audiences. For example, we routinely write four heads for columns: one that aims primarily at Google search, one for Google News (whose spiders scrape differently than do main Google’s), one that goes out to social networks and our RSS feeds, and one for print. All four will be closely related, and one or two might be identical, but this way we have the ability to offer more directly what a given audience might want.

Q. In an increasingly digital world, what do you see as the role of opinion writing at large news organizations like the Post? What does the future hold for the syndicated columnist?

A. These are good questions, and they tie into those threats I mentioned earlier.

Opinion writing certainly faces the potential of being commoditized, as news reporting has been already. After all, “Opinions are like belly buttons: Everyone has one.”

Through blogs and social media, technology has lowered the bar to publish and draw attention to opinion pieces, in a manner similar to what we’ve already seen with YouTube. So now you can find an almost endless stream of commentary on any issue you might name. (Khoi Vinh makes an interesting argument for punditry’s vulnerability to disruption.)

The Post defends against this by relying on such differentiators as authority and reputation, which readers have shown they value when deciding where to click. (An analogy might be Tiffany’s vs. Internet jewelry sales.)

We also have a built-in advantage: our location. We’re fortunate to be in a city where the battle of ideas is waged daily; if you’re interested in serious analysis of these issues, or in influencing the debate, The Post’s op-ed page (whether print or online) is an essential read.

This gives us a platform from which to suggest to thinkers and statesmen that they might want to write for The Post. This, in turn, gives us a leg up online in competing for readers, at least for that subset of readers that pays attention to the byline before clicking.

Column writing is underappreciated as a differentiator. If you asked a random passer-by to name a writer at The Washington Post, odds are you would hear George Will, Charles Krauthammer or Gene Robinson named, rather than one of our news reporters.

This stems in no small part from their television appearances rather than their written work, to be sure, but the invitation for those appearances rests on the authority of being a Post columnist, of implicitly being someone in the know. The Post benefits, too: Its reputation grows as the place to get more of such smart analysis.

So I’m very optimistic about the future of opinion writing at The Post and at the handful of other organizations that also see it as a core part of their business. It enables us to develop and maintain loyalty among our primary readership and, when Drudge lights the siren over a given piece, to expand our audience further.

I’m less certain about the future of syndication. The economic model still makes sense for client papers: It is cheaper for the Houston Chronicle to pay to run Kathleen Parker’s columns than to find and develop an in-house columnist for that space on the print op-ed page. And holding the rights for certain syndicated columns remains no less important in some markets than having certain comic strips.

As long as newspapers continue to provide op-ed pages, I see syndication playing a large role in filling that space. But I worry about how long that relationship will continue: Op-ed pages would seem to be an easy target for publishers looking to cut news hole further.

And the Internet has broken down the presumption of the syndication model for sponsoring papers: cultivating exclusivity through the sale of rights. Now you can read most syndicated columnists at a variety of web sites, so why should I go to The New York Times — where I have to pay money — to read Maureen Dowd?

I don’t know how this story ends, but there clearly is trouble on the horizon.

Follow Scott Butterworth on Twitter.

Q&A with Charles Duncan Pardo, editor of the Raleigh Public Record

Charles Duncan Pardo is editor of the Raleigh Public Record, a nonprofit news organization that covers the capital of North Carolina. In this interview, conducted by email, Pardo talks about his job, the Raleigh Public Record’s role in the Triangle and the outlook for nonprofit news.

Q. Describe your job. What is your typical day like?

A. I’m not sure if I have a typical day. I have two main jobs. In my “day job” for the Courthouse News Service I go to the Wake County Courthouse every day and Durham once a week to cover civil courts and track new filings.

I’m also responsible for supervising about 20 reporters spread out across the Southeast. I’m very lucky to have the Southeast Bureau Chief position with CNS because it gives me the flexibility to run Raleigh Public Record.

For the Record, my days typically involve assigning stories, talking with freelance reporters about ongoing stories and editing copy as it comes in. But I also spend a lot of time writing grants, maintaining the website, keeping up with everything that’s going on in Raleigh and generally taking care of all the tasks involved in running a small news operation. I even get to report a story every once in a while.

I typically spend half a day in the office and the other half downtown. I can’t work in one place for more than a couple of hours before my productivity drops.

But I also feel that as the editor I shouldn’t be stuck in the office all day. I should go work out of coffee shops and go to city hall and be able to talk to people, bug sources and check in on what’s going on around the city.

Q. The News & Observer and WRAL are the big players in the Triangle media. How does the Raleigh Public Record fit into that mix?

A. Our goal has never been to compete with the daily news organizations. Our goal is to complement. We don’t cover car crashes and drug busts. We seek out the stories that don’t get covered by the big organizations.

We have two focus areas. Raleigh city government has not had consistent coverage beyond city council meetings for quite some time. We almost always have the only reporter in the room for meetings like planning commission or the budget and economic development committee. These are important meetings where elected and government officials debate and make major decisions about Raleigh. We cover that lower-level news that has real everyday impact on the lives of people living here.

We also like to step back and be able to see the broader picture. Take the Wake County school board for example. The traditional news organizations do a good job of covering the day to day. But reporters covering that major story on a daily deadline can have trouble sometimes seeing the forest for the trees. Our job there is to get at the big picture. This is where we analyze the data, dig deep to give the analysis or investigate to get at the heart (and the facts) of a politicized debate.

Q. How does story editing and headline writing work at the website?

A. I or our assistant editor are very involved in stories from assignment through posting. For meeting coverage and short-term news stories, we talk to reporters when we make the assignments and then stories are submitted to me.

Depending on the reporter, the timeline and the deadline, sometimes we edit in person, and sometimes I will edit on my own. Then stories go to our assistant editor for copy editing, design and posting.

For longer stories I am very involved at each step in working with our reporters and making sure they are on the right track and asking all the right questions. Deadlines vary. For meetings and the like, we expect stories to be turned around same day, and they are typically posted that night or early the next morning.

For more involved reporting, we have deadlines that range from 24 hours to three weeks. I would much rather get something right and be thorough and thoughtful than get something online before it’s ready.

We have the luxury of not having to fill pages or time slots every day. We are also very cautious to make sure two pairs of eyes go through every story before we publish.

For headlines, we ask reporters to suggest headlines when submitting articles. I normally make changes to the headline or write a new one. If I’m stuck, I will send a short list of suggestions to our assistant editor, and she will help craft the right headline.

We have some constraints on headline writing just because of the layout of our site. In the top left column, for example, we can’t run a photo and a long word in the headline or the design comes out looking odd. So we try to keep them short and punchy, and we’re not afraid to have a little humor.

I will say that I despise puns in headlines. Sometimes I will let one get up, but I tend to groan when I see a pun in a headline.

Q. You’re part of a non-profit news organization. What do you see as the role of non-profits like yours as part of the future of journalism?

A. I think non-profit journalism is here to stay. What’s the role? We’re still working on figuring that out, at least here in Raleigh. But what we’re banking on is that the role of non-profit journalism organizations is to do the hard, sometimes tedious work that traditional news organizations either don’t have the staff for or can’t make any money from.

Covering the planning commission and doing local investigative journalism are two concrete examples. Our role is to be the local government watchdog, and we take that very seriously.

The next step will be to turn our track record of solid public service journalism for Raleigh into getting public support so we can continue paying for it well into the future.

Q&A with Joe Ovies, radio host and blogger

Joe Ovies is co-host of a sports talk show on 99.9 The Fan, a radio station in Raleigh, N.C. He also writes a blog about sports for WRALSportsFan. In this interview, conducted by email, Ovies talks about his job, social media and the way sports talk has changed.

Q. You’re on the radio and you blog for the WRALSportsFan website. What is your typical workday like?

A. Outside of what happens between 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. on 99.9FM The Fan, the typical day fluctuates. The morning consists of sifting through Google Reader, catching up on Twitter and putting together notes for possible show topics later in the day. I’ll text or email with Adam Gold (co-host) throughout the day to get an idea of where he stands on an issue or take on a game.

The nebulous part of the day arrives around lunch time. There could be an interview taping or meeting to attend in the middle of the day before the show starts.

Most show prep actually takes place at home, where I do a ton of reading and listening to sports talk throughout the day. We have show meetings at the station twice a week with our program director for long-term planning and discussions of show format tweaks since listener habits are constantly evolving.

The day doesn’t end when the show ends at 7 p.m. During the high-traffic months of college football and basketball, I’ll spend most of my evenings watching or going to games. Obviously, I have to watch all this stuff if I’m going to talk about it the next day. It’s a rough life, watching sporting events for a living.

Q. How do you decide what to blog about, and what role do editors play in that, if any?

A. Local topics get priority. That’s what WRALSportsFan can provide better than any national outlet.

Want the full coach’s press conference from NC State? We have that. Missed the interview with Coach K on The Fan? It’s there. Opinion on North Carolina getting bounced by Kansas? I’ll write something on it. Local content is our bread and butter.

Oddly enough, I’ve never really had an editor. When I started the 850 The Buzz blog in 2005, it was your typical blog. No editor, snarky views on local sports and a comment section that would devolve into flame wars. I wrote what I wanted to write about with no input from upper management.

After the merger with Capitol Broadcasting in 2009, I was introduced to an environment with actual structure: operations manager, sports director, online editors, etc. However, not much has changed in terms of what I decide to write about. The only difference now is that there’s someone around to change the headline and correct my grammar. I write like I talk, which won’t please the grammarians.

Q. How do you use Twitter and Facebook as part of your job?

A. Twitter is versatile, so here is how I use it.

News gathering and distribution: The real-time nature of Twitter gives it a certain advantage over RSS, so it’s great for getting the most up-to-date news throughout the day. Who you follow matters, so I’ve curated a list of ACC media members and national folks that provide the best information. Twitter is used to distribute our own news, podcasts or anything I might find interesting.

Interaction: Talk radio has always used alternative ways to interact with the show. At one point in time, faxing your opinion to a show was cutting edge. Then it was email. Then it was texting. Now social media is the new thing. But if you want to get the most out of Twitter, actually engage with followers who pop up in your mentions feed. Spend enough time on there and you’ll discover that many of your followers can tip you off to stories or sources. Twitter is also fantastic for commentary during games.

Branding: While I hate the term, it matters, and I’ve seen the results of using Twitter as an extension of the show. Radio is a faceless business, but the power of the avatar helps put a face with the voice (for better or worse). The Final Four in New Orleans was good example, where media members recognized who I was based on my Twitter avatar. Flash back five years ago, you’d have to catch a glimpse of a press badge to have an idea of who that person was.

I keep Facebook personal and do my best to maintain a tight friends list. The rule of thumb is, “have I met this person in real life?”

Google+ is still figuring itself out, but it is useful. I’ll typically post my columns from WRALSportsFan and we’re toying around with the Hangouts feature.

Q. Many students probably like the idea of writing and talking about sports for a living. What advice do you have for them to get a job like yours?

A. Do everything. Write, blog, tweet, podcast, edit video or whatever.

Companies are looking for a wide range of skills and employees capable of providing content on multiple platforms. There’s no such thing as “just a reporter” or “just a radio host” these days.

Follow Joe Ovies on Twitter and check out his blog.

Student guest post: Can editors and aggregators coexist?

Students in JOMC 457, Advanced Editing, are writing guest posts for this blog this semester. This is the sixth of those posts. Emily Evans is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill majoring in English and journalism (reporting). She was the copy desk co-editor at The Daily Tar Heel for three semesters, and she has interned both on the CNN Wire desk and at People magazine.

“Aggregation” is a big buzzword in the journalism industry these days. And whether praising it as good way to personalize news or criticizing it as a good way to replace humans with machines, everyone seems to have an opinion about it.

But what exactly does “aggregation” mean? Does it require editing — or replace it? And is it really the downfall of news as we know it?

The term “aggregation” can be difficult to pin down. It is frequently used to describe everything from human efforts to gather the best of what’s freely available online into one place to computer programs trawling the Internet for any headline that contains a few good keywords.

In the broadest sense, and for the purposes of this blog post, I’ll define aggregation as a newsgathering technique that compiles information — quotes, facts, pictures, even entire stories — from various sources, almost always online, and brings them together to create a new whole. This might be a website featuring headline links with related subject matter, like The Drudge Report, which gathers top political headlines. By linking to the original stories, sites like this provide clear attribution.

Aggregation can also refer to sites like The Huffington Post that purport to create and summarize original stories based on others floating around the web. This second type tends to be much more contentious: Humor website The Onion even once described the Huffington Post as possessing an “aggregation turbine.”

The Huffington Post has, ironically, made headlines of its own due to complaints it aggregates too much, and it has sparked much debate regarding the ethics and practice of aggregation. New York Times magazine writer Bill Keller unleashed an attack on The Huffington Post, claiming its content was nothing but “celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications.” This, of course, prompted a retaliation from Arianna Huffington herself, who cited the Columbia Journalism Review’s praise of the site’s work in defense of the journalists she employs.

Clearly, even at the top levels of the journalism industry, there’s disagreement about aggregation, but equally clear is the fact that it’s not going away. Even the Washington Post has gotten into the game with its Trove service that aims to personalize news for each reader. Its free Social Reader app lets users see which stories their Facebook friends have read. And a company called News.me just launched an aggregating app meant to corral users’ news interests and social networking into a streamlined, personalized feed.

Since aggregation is so nebulous and hard to define, it’s difficult to get everyone to agree on a common set of standards to govern its use and practice. That means that it’s difficult to find answers to many questions it raises, like how much borrowing from a story is too much.

Even media law has yet to catch up to aggregation: Is it OK to take an entire story if the original author is credited? What if the new story takes away the original author’s pageviews, thus depriving them of revenue for their work? What about aggregating done entirely by machine — is that even ethical?

I think that there is a place for aggregation in the journalism of today. But in order for it to be effective and accurate, it needs to be treated just like any other type of story.

Human aggregators need to be editors in the truest sense — curators of the words, pictures or even tweets they combine to craft a narrative, or the links they select for a news website. I think there are many great opportunities for multimedia aggregation stories — sites like Storify, which allows users of all types (from readers to media outlets) to search the web and social media for anything they’d like and create a story out of it, are great examples.

But care must be taken; it is just as easy to take a quote out of context from someone’s Twitter feed or Facebook timeline as it might be to misquote them, and the same goes for fact errors, both of which can be nearly impossible to correct when a story has traveled far and wide across the Internet — even perhaps re-aggregated. In an ideal world, aggregated stories and sites would involve a collaboration between seasoned reporters, editors and graphic designers, just as a front-page package would, to ensure accuracy and strength in storytelling.

As far as computer-based aggregators go, there is something to be said for the benefit of personalized news, and there’s certainly a market for it. So long as it is done in a way that credits (and drives traffic to) stories’ original authors, and so long as readers are clearly informed that a computer is doing the compiling, they’re OK in my mind.

But I don’t think they’re the future of news — or even the future of the majority of aggregation. Aggregation has some great possibilities to eliminate redundancies, expand creativity, encourage collaboration and offer a broader worldview.

Aggregation at its core is not so different than traditional reporting or from using wire services to compile a story. In order for traditional media outlets to “keep up with the times” and take advantage of technology, it makes a lot of sense as one more tool in the journalistic tool kit. It just requires a great editor.