For grammar nerds and editing buffs, the American Copy Editors Society regional workshop at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was the place to be Saturday, Oct. 9.
More than 50 people from Nebraska and beyond attended the daylong conference in Lincoln, which answered editing questions both new and old on topics including headlines, ethics, design and social media.
Students from the University of Missouri, Doane College and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln attended as well as professionals from Kansas, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.
And two students drove 14 hours from Powell, Wyo., to learn more about grammar and ethics.
“It’s fun to be around a bunch of grammar nerds,” said Danae Lenz, a sophomore at Northwest College in Powell.
Lenz is a co-editor of her college newspaper, the Northwest Trail. Her editing partner, Mark Keierleber also attended the conference.
“We have a lot of grammatical errors in our paper,” Keierleber, also a sophomore at Northwest College, said. “This was an opportunity not only to improve our paper, but also an opportunity to check out what other schools are doing.”
They both said one of the most beneficial sessions was one on ethics.
Neil Holdway, news editor of the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago and treasurer of ACES, led the discussion, titled “Ethics in editing big and small.”
Holdway defined ethics as how people are treated.
“We get a lot of criticism for how we treat people,” Holdway said. “That’s why we have to have the conversation.”
He presented the audience with real examples of misleading headlines and sensationalism. The group offered suggestions for mending the errors in the stories and news briefs – many attendees came up with different solutions. The question of ethics is an “age-old” problem for copy editors, Holdway said. Audience members agreed.
“Ethics is one thing our paper faces often,” Keierleber said after the session. “We run a lot of controversial stories about our college. Ethics is on our minds constantly.”
The conference at UNL also addressed new-age questions facing editors, including how to write headlines for the Web and how to use Twitter as a tool.
News organizations are learning more and more about search engine optimization, said Larry Sparks, an online editor at the Omaha World-Herald.
He and Lisa McLendon, deputy copy desk chief at the Wichita Eagle and vice president/conferences for ACES, led a discussion on writing headlines.
Unlike print, Web headlines must include information that will lead people searching for a topic online to your news site.
To write search-engine-friendly headlines, editors should think about how they would search a topic. Include proper names, put columnists names in headlines and remember links matter, Sparks said. Avoid headlines that won’t make sense without the visuals that accompany the headline in print.
Another Web-oriented session was Sue Burzynski Bullard’s lesson on social media.
Bullard, associate professor at UNL and ACES executive committee member, said there are many uses for Twitter including drawing traffic to a website, marketing yourself and staying on top of news. She urged members of the audience to start small by creating an account and finding a focus for their Twitter.
While Twitter will not replace journalism, it is a leading source of breaking news, Bullard said during her presentation.
“Twitter’s got a lot of trash on it, but so does TV and so do papers,” Bullard said. “You’ll see headlines you don’t care about, but who cares. Keep skimming your feed.”
Lindsey Hrabik, a sophomore at Doane College, admitted she has yet to jump on the Twitter bandwagon.
“I didn’t realize until now how helpful it could be and how useful it is,” Hrabik said after the Twitter session. “I’m probably going to use it more.”
Sampy and Hrabik were two of three students who attended the conference from their college. Their professor, David Swartzlander, thought the conference would apply to what he was teaching in his editing and design class.
“ACES did a very good job with the conference,” Swartzlander, an associate professor of journalism at Doane, said. “This is a valuable opportunity to have so close in Lincoln. My students get the chance to meet professionals and it confirms I’m teaching the right stuff.”
