At the Columbia Missourian, a daily community newspaper operated by the University of Missouri School of Journalism, faculty members found themselves facing some questions about the structure of the newsroom last fall and the way they educate copy editors.
The basic question was what do Mizzou copy editing students need to know to succeed?
Last fall, the newspaper saw a transition, both in staffing and in thinking, designed to answer some of that question.
Nick Jungman and Maggie Walter of the Knight Center in Editing Excellence at the Missouri School of Journalism talked about those changes Friday during a session called “The Transition: Creating an Interactive Copy Desk” at the 15th annual American Copy Editors Society national conference.
As Jungman explained, part of the discussion started because the Missouri is a 6,000-circulation newspaper that has a website with about 15,000 unique visitors per day. So was the Missourian “Web-first”? Did it need Web producers?
And with students demanding a more web-centric experience, what should the school do?
At the bottom line, Jungman said, the faculty had to think about how copy editing is evolving in hybrid print-online and online-only newsrooms?
At a faculty retreat in August, master’s student Andrew Van Dam suggested print was “infecting” the newsroom and that it had to be quarantined. That may be overblown rhetoric, Jungman agreed, but the idea was to make a sea change in the newsroom processes.
Van Dam suggested separate the desks for print and online. And the bulk of the Missourian staff would spend the day just thinking about the website.
Jungman and Walter said faculty members decided to give it a try. The Missourian would have an interactive copy desk for the web and a smaller print copy desk. The newsroom really would be driven by the interactive side of the operation.
In designing the project, they determined that copy editors were closest to the readers, Jungman said. So to make the Missourian more interactive, they had to make the copy desk more interactive.
So they rearranged the furniture. They wanted to make the interactive copy desk the focal point of the room and push the print desk into an area by itself.
The change, Jungman said, created a center feature called “The ICE Box” (for Interactive Copy Editor) and it’s next to “The Hub,” where many of the newsroom decision makers sit.
They moved around desks to create a corral for the print editors in an area that was already somewhat separated.
They also rearranged the work schedules to distribute more copy editors throughout the day, with particular emphasis on early morning. The interactive desk is almost continuously staffed now throughout the day.
Decisions for the print edition are made only by the print team. There is little to no print planning in the regular budget meetings, Jungman said.
Audience members asked how the students reacted to the change.
“The way it was presented to us, it was almost effortless,” said Kevin Deane, a Mizzou journalism student who now works shifts on both desks.
Interactive copy editors might work with Twitter or Facebook, link Google maps, do simple surveys, add text links and optimize headlines in addition to editing.
Interactive copy editors also remake the home page and re-rank stories, have comment duties and correct errors. The Missourian also started an initiative called
“Show Me the Errors” that allows readers to report errors in stories through a link that appears with each story on the Web.
The print team, Jungman said, is about five people, and one copy editor from the interactive desk moves to the print side in the evening to help out.
The print team, made up mainly of students in design class, makes the decision about what is going on the front page, from the web-posted copy available. Stories might go up on the web a few days before they appear in print, because the print team will decide it needs to hold a story to fill a future need.
Josh Barone, a Mizzou student and teaching assistant, said the print team tries to make the print edition more relevant for the readers, since the stories have all already appeared on the Web.
“We looked at independent things we could do for print, like pullout boxes (that didn’t appear on the Web). We do things like a Halloween page we did last fall that was unique to the newspaper,” Barone said.
The print team works about the same shift as copy editors did as prior to the split, and an interactive copy editor still signs off on the print pages.
But the print team has its own planning meeting and its own budget, which it cobbles together from what the interactive side does, Jungman said.
The result is that the copy editing students as a whole are learning interactive skills such as SEO for headlines, differentiated headline writing, analytics and widgets.
And the impact on print has been less than some might expect, Jungman said.
“We can’t say that the print edition is all that it was before, but there was less impact than you might think,” Jungman said. “We know that our editing students are more challenged with headline writing than they were before. Because we pushed all the planning for print to a desk that is student heavy, the print selection is not what the professors might have wanted.”
But Jungman said almost everything the goes up on the Web is fresh.
“I feel like we’re better positioned to manage breaking news now,” he said.
Jungman said he didn’t think the change would be a drawback to the students, many who will go out and find a job with a print-centric organization. And he said a lot of graduates are going to places like Patch.com where interactive skills are required.
Audience member Henry Fuhrmann, assistant managing editor for copy desks at the Los Angeles Times, echoed the need for such training. He said his newspaper has recently hired five copy editors and interactive skills were a big part of the hiring process.
“What you’re doing at Missouri is valuable,” Fuhrmann said.
