| ByKate Karp
With nearly every paper in the countrysupporting an adjunct Web site, copy desks are jumpinginto fast cars and driving the Information Superhighway, leavingprint-only in the dust. At this year’sACES conference in Miami, an online journalism track wasintroduced to address questions and topics that plague or intrigue copy editors:necessary skills to facilitate a culture change, job cuts and opportunities, the importance of a print medium in a cyber world and whatsort of animal exists as a Web page. “What rules dowe follow?” asked Robert Griffin, assistant news editorat The Oklahoman. According to JohnRussial of University of Oregon and co-presenter of “Editingin a Multimedia World,” all bets are off, for now. The rules are still beingwritten, whether by individual editorial staff, reporters, online producers, print editors or a combination of any and all. Online journalismis still in a fledgling state, but has a wingspan thatseems to be extending indefinitely. One of the firsteggs was hatched in 1993, Russial said, when the San Jose Mercury put up a Web site. Asbrowsers and technology improved, the number of paperswith sites increased. Now, nearly 100 percent of print media haveadjunct sites, and the order of the day is sorting out what to put on them, and how the material differs for BlackBerrys, iPods, cellphones and those increasingly ubiquitous blogs. The mindGoogles. 
| Leslie-Jean Thornton(Arizona State University) gave a primer on the basicsof news Web sites. | | And it all has to be edited. Russial and the other presenters, Suzanne Levinson of miamiherald.com and Eric Ulken fromlatimes.com, described the current form of online editingas ranging from utilizing a special online division tomake sure the text is in proper form to dumping it all in without touchingit. However, Levinsonsaid, “online editions are not appendages or afterthoughts;they are the first edition. The word is still king.” Online writing,as with print, still has to serve the story, be correctand engage the mind, but with the immediacy that the Internet provides, it’snecessary to catch the eye first. The most well-designed page with plentyof links and a couple of user blogs still has to have baitto hook readers. This is where one of the many online initialisms,SEO (Search Engine Optimization), comes in. Headlines arestill key, but don’t have the same function as a zippy hed does. Instead,they are straightforward, with key story vocabulary that will quickly lead readers to the site. For example, “Trump Bristles at O’Donnell’sHairstyle Brush-Off” may be wordy, but will bring morehits to a Web site than “Host Wigs Out.” The presentersalso stressed the importance of attending to “traffic time,”which are the hours when the most people are making hits; specificity ofcontent (as with Gertrude Stein and Oakland, there is no “there” there onthe Internet, and a local story still must have the exactdate and location of the event covered); and design, whichalso includes ad placement. An ad may be put on the home pageor in a pop-up. As in most media, ads drive the viability of an online paper, and a home page is not considered the front page. In “Intro to OnlineEditing,” Leslie-Jean Thornton of Arizona State Universityspoke of the danger of putting material up quickly to be first with astory, instead of spending time to make it correct. A piece of erroneousinformation that is up for a number of seconds and thenquickly taken down for correction will have already beenseen by thousands of people, and most Web sites don’t print retractions. Photographs,too, need to be checked to see that they haven’t been fed into a previously used caption. Russial showed a number of amusing and embarrassingexamples of this. Blogs are usefulfor gauging reader response and getting an idea of whothe readers are, but also create a question of interactivity and credibility that, according to Thornton, is “another weekend of sessionsaltogether.” There was also strong warning against editingany of the postings. Any editorial changes could subjectthe newspaper to liability that might result from an offending posting. It was advised to either dump questionable postings or leavethem in their original form. 
| Chris Wienandt (Dallas Morning News) leads a discussion on "Reorganizing the Newsroom for Online," part ofthe online track at the Miami conference. | | To address the question of skills necessary to make thecyberjump, Thornton discussed several adjunct skills necessaryto make the transition, such as copy/paste, correctingmaterial in code and audio/visual editing. Editing can takethe form of chunking instead of attention to story flow, and the first paragraph of a story is always a teaser to draw in the reader tothe rest of it. Thornton also extensively defined SEO andother initialisms related to online text, and showed ashort Web video, Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us. CNN.com’s Jim Kavanagh,who presented in “Leaving Print for Online,” stressed thatany competent copy editor already has the necessary basic skillsand needs only to learn the new culture. Online journalism is still journalism. Although print media has seen a decline in job positions,Kavanagh sees the lost jobs following the ad money thatis increasingly going online. To the notion thatprint media will soon go the way of the drive-in movieand that readers will have to wrestle with the logistics of a laptop inthe bathroom or the expense of lining the hamster cage with them, there wasconsiderable naysaying. ESPN’s Jay Wang, copresenter of“Leaving Print for Online,” said that paper ranks higherin keepsake value and portability. Russial was even more optimistic. “They thought thatradio would kill newspaper, TV would kill radio and everythingwould kill books,” he said. “None of that has happened. Paper willprobably never disappear -- or at least, not soon.”
To view Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us, visit www.youtube.com/watch?V=6gmP4nK0EOE. What the heck, use your SEO and Googlethe key words.
Kate Karp is a freelance copy editor and proofreaderfrom Long Beach, Calif. RETURN TOWWW.COPYDESK.ORG |
