Steve Buttry, director of community engagement for TBD.com
In his Twitter profile, Steve Buttry calls himself “a digital immigrant.” He also acknowledges he’s an “old copy editor.”
Buttry, in fact, can count reporter, editor, news innovation trainer and, now, director of community engagement, among his many media titles.
The community engagement gig is his most recent, and it comes at TBD.com, a web, TV and mobile local news operation launched in August in the Washington, D.C., area.
Prior to joining TBD, he was with Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he served as editor of The Gazette and GazetteOnline and C3 Innovation Coach.
Buttry spent 40 years in the newspaper business, starting as a carrier in junior high and moving up through the ranks.
ACES members may be familiar with the multimedia storytelling workshop he has led at the national conference and the copy editing conferences he ran through Mid-American Press Institute.
In an e-mail interview with ACES, Buttry talks about TBD; errors, transparency and copy editing on the web; and how print copy editors can build their community engagement resume and leverage their current skills in the online journalism world.
Q: You are the director of community engagement at TBD.com, an online local news startup in Washington, D.C. What does a community engagement director do?
My staff and I work to make TBD part of the community conversation – by joining, leading and listening in social media, by hosting some of the conversation on our site and by connecting with and aggregating blogs and other content that reflects the conversation.
Q: What should journalists outside the Washington area know about TBD and the TBD concept?
We are trying to develop a professional local news organization that is, in our founding General Manager Jim Brady’s words, “not just on the web, but of the web.” Though Jim is leaving, I am confident he has built an operation that will endure. TBD is not just a catchy name (though we hope it is that). It reflects our approach to covering the unfolding news story and it reflects our unfolding business model.
Q. You recently did a TBD Community Network workshop with Craig Silverman of Regret the Error about accuracy and verification online. Silverman shared data about accuracy and the processes of most news organizations. Why is this type of information particularly important for today’s copy editors?
I think accuracy and verification are the most important responsibilities of copy editors (or any journalist). Style and grammar are much more important to copy editors than to most users. Accuracy is of primary importance to users, so it better be essential to all journalists. (Note: Watch the slides and podcast from the workshop here.)
Q. TBD generated a lot of buzz this fall with a correction posted on the “Sex and gender at work, in bed, and on the street” blog by Amanda Hess. You followed up with a post about transparency at TBD. The writer could have easily fixed the error, which involved a missing ‘n’ in the word “men,” without mentioning it. Why is transparency so important on a news website?
Transparency builds trust. I can’t tell you how many corrections I have read that didn’t explain what they were correcting. Even with accurate information, they confused more than they corrected. Opaqueness reflects a reluctance to correct, and I think users pick up on that.
Q: Why do you think so many websites fail to acknowledge corrections?
Arrogance and perfectionism.
Q: Does TBD have a specific corrections policy?
This is from a blog post Erik Wemple, TBD’s editor, and I wrote prior to launch (Erik wrote this passage): “We will be as aggressive in correcting our mistakes as we were in making them. Each article or blog item that includes a mistake will carry highly visible correction, and a repository for all corrections that appear on the site will be available sometime after launch. The corrections policy will apply to all errors of fact as well as misspellings of proper nouns and the like. Errors than can be classified as typos will get a pass.” (FYI, the repository is not yet available.)
Q: After you wrote about the error, a commenter on the Poynter site criticized TBD’s decision not to hire copy editors. Can you talk about that decision, and also what you think the ideal would be for any website that faces pressures for both accuracy and speed of providing information to readers?
Erik Wemple made the decision and I wouldn’t presume to speak for Erik (though I passed the question along, and he said he liked my answer). What I can say is that no web startup can afford to look at staffing the way that a newspaper traditionally did. The first newspaper I worked for, the Evening Sentinel in Shenandoah, Iowa, (circ. 4,000), had no copy editors either. The overworked city editor barely looked at my stories before passing them on to typesetting, so I had to take responsibility for my own work on all levels: accuracy, style, grammar, spelling. I think most digital journalists will similarly have to take full responsibility for their content. That said, TBD does have several editors, and I believe they help us maintain a pretty strong level of quality. I expect and hope that as digital news operations develop strong revenue streams, copy editors will be part of staff expansion. As an old copy editor, I respect the value that copy editors deliver. As a manager in a digital startup, I know that every position Erik chose for the news staff was essential and delivers more value than we believe a copy editor would deliver for our organization.
Q: How does TBD handle headline writing and other tasks traditionally done by copy editors at print publications?
Reporters and content producers write their headlines, with training, advice and input from editors and from our research director, Mitch Schuler, who’s an SEO whiz and watches trending search terms closely.
Q: You were an early Twitter user and social media is a big part of the TBD site. Who does the tweeting for TBD? Do you think headline skills come into play on Twitter?
Mandy Jenkins (@mjenkins) is our social media producer and the usual voice of @TBD. But others on the community engagement staff (and a few editors) pitch in. During the morning rush, community host Lisa Rowan handles @TBDCommute and some of @TBD (Mandy schedules some tweets for the morning rush, too). Mandy’s a social media whiz who has set a great tone for us in social media. She coaches the rest of the staff in effective use of social media as well. Nearly everyone at TBD is deeply active in social media. I think Twitter is a great tool for helping journalists get to the point, which is the purpose of a headline (as well as a lead). Tweets should be more conversational than lots of headlines are, but experience/skill in either should be helpful in the other. I think too many news organizations use Twitter simply as a headline feed.
Q: How can copy editors take a role in community engagement at their organizations?
Take the initiative. If you have a slow stretch in your news flow (we did when I was a copy editor, but there might not be such a thing now), explore what you could do during that time to help with community engagement: identify local blogs for your organization to network with; find local people to follow on Twitter and converse with them (or watch for news/trends reflected in their tweets). One of our copy editors when I was at The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, @dvdlee, would occasionally crowdsource a headline and discuss pages he was designing, asking the community which story they thought deserved higher play. (I don’t see him doing that now; not sure he’s still on the copy desk.)
Q. How can copy editors in traditional editing jobs sell themselves as candidates for the new journalism jobs opening in non-print platforms?
Use social media in work and privately, even if you’re editing only for print. Seek tweeps’ feedback on headlines and news play decisions in real time. Link to your work (PDFs of your page designs, heads you’ve written, etc.) from a personal web page, blog or LinkedIn profile. Your digital profile will sell your work as a prospective employer investigates you online. I blogged some advice for landing a job in digital journalism: http://bit.ly/c0x5eN.
One strong part of your pitch should be that as a copy editor, your copy is clean and ready to go online. Another is that you are used to working fast and producing a lot.
