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By
Kate Karp
With nearly every paper in the country
supporting an adjunct Web site, copy desks are jumping
into fast cars and driving the Information Superhighway, leaving
print-only in the dust.
At this year’s
ACES conference in Miami, an online journalism track was
introduced 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 what
sort of animal exists as a Web page.
“What rules do
we follow?” asked Robert Griffin, assistant news editor
at The Oklahoman.
According to John
Russial of University of Oregon and co-presenter of “Editing
in a Multimedia World,” all bets are off, for now. The rules are still being
written, whether by individual editorial staff, reporters, online producers,
print editors or a combination of any and all. Online journalism
is still in a fledgling state, but has a wingspan that
seems to be extending indefinitely.
One of the first
eggs was hatched in 1993, Russial said, when the San Jose
Mercury put up a Web site. As
browsers and technology improved, the number of papers
with sites increased. Now, nearly 100 percent of print media have
adjunct sites, and the order of the day is sorting out what to put on them,
and how the material differs for BlackBerrys, iPods, cell
phones and those increasingly ubiquitous blogs. The mind
Googles.
| Leslie-Jean Thornton
(Arizona State University) gave a primer on the basics
of news Web sites. |
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And it all has to be edited. Russial and the other presenters,
Suzanne Levinson of miamiherald.com and Eric Ulken from
latimes.com, described the current form of online editing
as ranging from utilizing a special online division to
make sure the text is in proper form to dumping it all in without touching
it.
However, Levinson
said, “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 correct
and engage the mind, but with the immediacy that the Internet provides, it’s
necessary to catch the eye first. The most well-designed page with plenty
of links and a couple of user blogs still has to have bait
to hook readers. This is where one of the many online initialisms,
SEO (Search Engine Optimization), comes in. Headlines are
still 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’s
Hairstyle Brush-Off” may be wordy, but will bring more
hits to a Web site than “Host Wigs Out.”
The presenters
also stressed the importance of attending to “traffic time,”
which are the hours when the most people are making hits; specificity of
content (as with Gertrude Stein and Oakland, there is no “there” there on
the Internet, and a local story still must have the exact
date and location of the event covered); and design, which
also includes ad placement. An ad may be put on the home page
or 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 Online
Editing,” Leslie-Jean Thornton of Arizona State University
spoke of the danger of putting material up quickly to be first with a
story, instead of spending time to make it correct. A piece of erroneous
information that is up for a number of seconds and then
quickly taken down for correction will have already been
seen 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 embarrassing
examples of this.
Blogs are useful
for gauging reader response and getting an idea of who
the readers are, but also create a question of interactivity and credibility
that, according to Thornton, is “another weekend of sessions
altogether.” There was also strong warning against editing
any of the postings. Any editorial changes could subject
the newspaper to liability that might result from an offending posting. It
was advised to either dump questionable postings or leave
them in their original form.
| Chris Wienandt (Dallas Morning News) leads a discussion
on "Reorganizing the Newsroom for Online," part of
the online track at the Miami conference. |
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To address the question of skills necessary to make the
cyberjump, Thornton discussed several adjunct skills necessary
to make the transition, such as copy/paste, correcting
material in code and audio/visual editing. Editing can take
the 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 to
the rest of it. Thornton also extensively defined SEO and
other initialisms related to online text, and showed a
short Web video, Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us.
CNN.com’s Jim Kavanagh,
who presented in “Leaving Print for Online,” stressed that
any competent copy editor already has the necessary basic skills
and 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 that
is increasingly going online.
To the notion that
print media will soon go the way of the drive-in movie
and that readers will have to wrestle with the logistics of a laptop in
the bathroom or the expense of lining the hamster cage with them, there was
considerable naysaying. ESPN’s Jay Wang, copresenter of
“Leaving Print for Online,” said that paper ranks higher
in keepsake value and portability. Russial was even more optimistic.
“They thought that
radio would kill newspaper, TV would kill radio and everything
would kill books,” he said. “None of that has happened. Paper will
probably 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 Google
the key words.
Kate Karp is a freelance copy editor and proofreader
from Long Beach, Calif.
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