The BBC posted a Web story July 13 that was guaranteed to catch most copy editors’ attention: “Spelling mistakes ‘cost millions’ in lost online sales.”
The crux of the story: Charles Duncombe, an entrepreneur who runs travel, clothing and mobile phone websites, said an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.
Score one for the value of copy editing, right? Read the rest of this entry »
Among the gatekeeper roles copy editors traditionally perform has been deciding when something becomes a “headline word.” Typically this has to do with a name. A person gets into the news often, and the copy editor has to decide if it has been often enough that one can say “Valdez” in the headline and readers will know it is local politician Tranquilino Valdez and not be scratching their heads saying, “Valdez? Who’s Valdez? Do they mean Juan Valdez? I like his coffee.”
If you don’t work for a newspaper, would ACES benefit you?
As a member of the ACES Board, I was charged with answering that question recently for someone who works primarily as a proofreader in the marketing and advertising industry.
My answer; Absolutely! Have you looked at the ACES website and the past conferences and sessions offered? There are many sessions that would apply to anyone who edits or proofreads. Handouts are still available.
Check out these from our Phoenix conference just a few months ago.
These were some great sessions, and they apply to any copy editor or proofreader:
• The Power of Proofreading.
• Freelance Editors Forum.
• Nuts and Bolts Grammar.
• Twitter for Editors (if you tweet).
• Editing Maps and Graphics. Read the rest of this entry »
The Breakfast of Editing Champions returns to the AEJMC national convention in St. Louis on Thursday, Aug. 11. As in years past, ACES members will play a prominent role.
The breakfast, which will begin at 8:15 a.m., is free and open to anyone who teaches editing, appreciates editing or simply likes to hang around editing professors. That should be pretty much everyone.
This year’s breakfast is BYOB: Bring Your Own Bagel. As in years past, coffee will be provided. If you would like to attend, RSVP by signing up on the event’s Facebook page.
The agenda is simple, yet fundamental to journalism that matters: the future of editing and editing education. This year’s breakfast will include a panel discussion on the fast-moving changes in our field:
A highlight of the breakfasts has been the Teaching Idea Exchange, in which we swap assignment and strategies. Jill Van Wyke of Drake University will handle the exchange this year, so send your best teaching idea or tip to her at jill.vanwyke@drake.edu by Friday, July 29. Send her a few paragraphs on your idea and be ready to discuss it for a minute or two at the breakfast.
Thanks to these sponsors for making the event (and coffee) possible: ACES, Poynter’s News University and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill. Thanks also to the Newspaper and Scholastic Journalism divisions of AEJMC for their support.
See you in St. Louis!
What should the copy desk of the future be?
ACES member Nick Jungman has thought about that question during the past year in his job working with the Columbia Missourian at the Missouri School of Journalism. In a presentation at the 2011 ACES conference in Phoenix, he and Maggie Walter of the Knight Center in Editing Excellence at MU talked about the evolving role of the copy desk in a session called “The Transition: Creating an Interactive Copy Desk,” detailing changes in the Missourian’s newsroom.
The conference’s closing general session posed the same question. One answer was to “make our jobs bigger.”
Nick just left the Missourian for the Wichita Business Journal, but he wrote a last blog about the Transition, titled “The Death of the Night Copy Desk.” (ACES President Teresa Schmedding wrote on the same topic in this blog on June 16.)
One of the major points — that copy editing has to happen in all platforms, and that it must happen first where it’s needed first — especially hit home for me this week. Read the rest of this entry »
Still haven’t signed on to Twitter? Now might be the time to start. Twitter published a resource guide for newsrooms this week, called #TfN. Beyond being great headline practice, copy editors in some newsrooms are taking on social media duties. You may be asked to handle a newsroom Twitter feed if you aren’t already doing it. And even if you aren’t using Twitter on the job yet, my guess is at some point you will be. The Twitter guide might be a good starting point for you. And here’s another explanation of how the guide works from Gordon MacMillan. (Thanks to Doug Fisher’s blog for that link).
If you use Twitter for nothing else, I’ve found it’s a great way to connect with other editors who often post interesting links to stories and information about editing. The key to making Twitter useful is following the right people. You can start by following the ACES feed at @copyeditors. Mark Allen (@editormark) also has created some handy lists of copy editors including folks who attended the ACES conference in Phoenix. You can find it here. Check out @grammarmonkeys for helpful tips on grammar and style or Merrill Perlman’s Twitter feed @meperl for good advice on language and usage.
Following the right people is a lot like having your own news wire, loaded up with links to information on topics you’re interested in.
Steve Yelvington suggests in a blog that it is. He’s not advocating that stories not be edited, just that “if you’re editing stories for a newspaper deadline, you’re doing it wrong.”
We’ve made a lot of changes at the Daily Herald. I turned my temporary gig as web editor into a permanent position where I oversee content on all platforms. One of the first things I did was cram the copy desk knee-deep in multiplatform editing.
Quality is up — which makes me feel good about the content we’re giving our online readers, and I think we’ll have a better chance at charging for content if it’s not riddled with errors.
Some employees are working swing shifts vs. full night shifts but, for the most part, the day desk has picked up additional editing duties. I admit, though, I’ve toyed with the idea of pulling more people in earlier. No sense in editing a story at 8 p.m. that’s ready at 4 p.m.
I’d be interested in hearing what you guys think? Or if you’re seeing such changes in your shops as well.
In an earlier blog post, “Providing ‘cleaner copy’ no substitute for sub-editors,” ACES Treasurer Neil Holdway wrote about the plans by Australia’s biggest newspapers, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, to outsource their sub-editors.
He wrote that “the papers will be putting quality control at risk. We expect the loss of the local and institutional knowledge in-house sub-editors provide will be noticed by the papers and, more importantly, their readers.”
On May 26, journalists from the Sydney Morning Herald and others protested the outsourcing of the sub-editing staff.
Listen to what those protesters said about the newspapers losing “about a thousand years of experience” and the danger of taking the editor aspect out of the local newsroom.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-QmqkBdfYw]
Work as copy editor at any publication long enough and you’ll experience a hit-and-run complaint. You know, when your neighbor points out a headline misspelling (arrgh!) or when a relative calls to say your newspaper hit new lows today by ending a sentence with a preposition.
When the person is right, I admit it and promise we’ll try to do better. But there’s no defense against Great Aunt Betty, who believes the presses will grind to a halt because that “at” was followed by a period.
Somewhere along the line, a teacher or some such person imparted this “wisdom” to Aunt Betty and it has passed from personal preference to indisputable rule. (Was it Walter Burns in “His Girl Friday” who said “never end a sentence with a preposition and never draw to an inside straight”? I’m not sure. But part of that advice holds up — until you win a bunch of cash.) Read the rest of this entry »
Can text-to-speech cut errors in stories?
By Teresa Schmedding | 12:59 pm June 6, 2011 | No comments
Chip Scanlan of Poynter contacted me the other day with a question about text-to-speech programs, wondering if more journalists should rely on them to help spot errors and convoluted prose.
It’s an interesting question. We all know that just giving your own story a second read isn’t good enough. You often don’t see your own mistakes. I’d be curious to see if you could “hear” them, either.
There is value in hearing your words out loud. When I was supervising green reporters, I’d often tell those with clunky writing to read their stories outloud and, whenever they stumbled or had to pause for a breath, that meant rewrite.
So you might notice incorrect word usage or really garbled sentences using a text-to-speech program, but you’d never catch homonym errors or problems with the pace/cadence of a story.
Anything that helps catch errors in a story is a good thing, but I wouldn’t advocate text-to-speech as a replacement for living, breathing, critical-thinking copy editors. They bring an objective human eye — the eye of the reader — to your story. They catch when you use “their” instead of “there.” They catch when you forget a first reference or spell the mayor’s name wrong. They catch those libelous statements. They flag it when you forget to include the tax increase percentage point. Or items that might not fit the taste/tone of your publication.
But if might be nice if stories came to us cleaner so we could focus more on skeptical editing skills and less on just making something readable.
What do you guys think? Would text-to-speech help supplement, but not replace, the work we do?
Tags: editing, errors, quality
Posted in Commentary, Shop Talk | No Comments »