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Posted 5:32 pm February 4, 2010 by Teresa Schmedding
The Edelman Digital team has published a brand new white paper with 10 ideas for the new decade.
Among the 10, is the following section on the media:
Journalism strikes back
“The Media is Dying” is a popular Twitter channel that tracks layoffs and the financial struggles battering traditional news media.
The tweets read like epitaphs, whether it’s impending doom at The Associated Press; London’s Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday paper, closing; or the Tribune Co. shrinking papers to save on newsprint. The reality is, however, that while news became bigger than ever this past decade, journalism got smaller. “Content” replaced stories; aggregators replaced reporters; and being first replaced being accurate.
Yet the tide is turning. In 2010, journalism strikes back. According to a study by the National Newspaper Association, 86 million Americans still read local newspapers every week, and 60 percent say the newspaper is their primary source of information about their community.
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Posted 7:18 pm February 2, 2010 by Neil Holdway
ACES doesn’t have a staff.
We do employ two indispensable people: our administrator, Carol DeMasters, who keeps track of the membership and deposits checks and handles mailings and tends to some of the conference’s many little details, like your ever-important name badges; and now our executive director, Rudy Bahr, whom we have focusing particularly on securing conference sponsorships and grants and more members.
But there’s plenty left to do. That’s where the ACES Executive Committee comes in. And you get to hire its members.
If and when you vote for ACES board members, you’re selecting from among all the candidates the people who will not only set the direction of ACES and make key decisions about the organization, but who will also, plain and simply, do a lot of the work that’s required to keep it running.
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Posted 6:22 pm February 1, 2010 by Teresa Schmedding
Suburban Newspapers of America recently released its 2009 market study, which was designed to examine newspaper readership among suburban adults, plus their shopping habits, purchasing decisions and online behaviors.
Some of the results were surprising and some inspiring.
• There are more readers of free, suburban weeklies than of metro paid dailies.
• Readers don’t tie quality to price – meaning they don’t think the news in their free paper is less credible than that in a paid metro.
• 78% of readers rated their suburban paper as good to excellent.
• 83% said their paper keeps them informed.
In addition, and probably the most heartening result for print journalists, 74% said not having a newspaper would hurt civic life.
Here’s what readers said is important to them:
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Posted 2:21 pm January 25, 2010 by Daniel Hunt
 Some very exciting news just came to my inbox. Deirdre Edgar, ACES’ vice president of conferences, has been named Readers Representative at the Los Angeles Times, replacing Jamie Gold, who is leaving the Times.
This is a great new position for Deirdre, one of the nicest and most professional copy editors I’ve known. As the readers’ representative, she will shed light on the newsmaking process at one of the nation’s largest papers and explore matters of accuracy and fairness in its coverage.
Memo from Times Editor Russ Stanton follows:
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Posted 12:56 pm January 22, 2010 by Teresa Schmedding
Below is the latest in media research, summed up by Clyde Bentley, of the University of Missouri, the Reynolds Journalism Institute and an ACES research committee member.
Why should you care? As Clyde notes in his post: Research will be king — the more you know about the audience, the better chance you have of keeping a piece of the pie.
Being a copy editor in the next decade means you need to know more about the industry beyond your cubicle. If you know your market, you can shape your future. Use research data to push your ideas up the ladder and become the innovator in the newsroom. Or just use it to do your jobs better. For example, if aging Boomers are exploding online, does that change how your write heads for the Web?
Knowledge is power…Here’s Clyde’s summary of research:
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Posted 7:53 pm January 21, 2010 by Neil Holdway
Tim McGuire of the Cronkite journalism school at Arizona State University wrote in his blog this week about the evolution of editing at newspapers and the need not to willy-nilly cut copy editors for the sake of the budget — thank you, Tim! He was building off Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander’s column on the increased errors in his paper as a result of its shrinking staff, including the copy desk with its expanded, multiplatform role (managed by former ACES board member Anne Ferguson-Rohrer).
Both pieces had me thinking of what some of us might now call “the good old days,” though McGuire doesn’t seem to want to call them that. In the good old days, three years ago — kidding! — more like in the 1990s and up to 2005, we newspaper and probably some magazine copy editors were worried about how pagination would affect the quality of our work, in that our time would be split into actual editing of copy and the more mechanical assembly of pages. And then in the 2000s we began to worry about how the Internet would affect our editing the same way. We quickly noticed publications’ rush to get copy online regardless of how it’s edited; that problem obviously still exists today, as David Sullivan wrote so eloquently in this space recently. (more…)
Posted 1:34 pm January 7, 2010 by Gerri Berendzen
Putting the headline “Cut this story!” on Michael Kinsley’s theAtlantic.com column suggesting newspaper articles are too long seemed like a challenge to me, a 27-year veteran of cutting long newspaper copy.
Fifteen minutes, three reads and negative 534 words later, I decided I had better things to do with my evening than buckle under to the Atlantic’s command.
The lengthy stories Kinsley cited (all from the New York Times and the Washington Post) are not often found in the nation’s smaller newspapers, but the constructions he used as examples appear in newspapers of all sizes, from all types of reporters. (more…)
Posted 7:16 pm by Chris Wienandt
This is not a major anyone offered when I was in college.
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Want to be trustworthy? Don’t throw away your safety net
Posted 12:04 pm February 8, 2010 by Gerri Berendzen
Here’s another reason why news publications shouldn’t publish unedited copy on the Web — because errors tend to reproduce themselves quickly online and threaten to rewrite history.
On Thursday, Feb. 4, John Robinson, editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., wrote in his blog about how the Washington Post made what he called “a common but significant error” in a story about the recognition of the Greensboro Four at the National Museum of American History.
The error: The writer described a photo purported to be from the first sit-in at the Greensboro Woolworth on Feb. 1, 1960. Robinson notes that the photo was actually taken on the second day of the protest, Feb. 2, 1960, and pictures only two of the original four protestors.
In this case, I suspect it’s possible a copy editor outside Greensboro might not have noticed this error. But the fact of it, and how it relates to history, got me to thinking about the perpetuation of errors in cyberspace. (more…)