Cut to fit

Mark Baldwin's blog and a reporter's response brought up the topic of how aggressively we edit stories, and the primary purpose of "tightening."

I don't have all the answers, but I have a question for the copy desk: If a reporter and assignment editor want to run a longer than usual story on the front page, say in the 400-word range, what can they do to ensure it isn't chopped substantially by the time it sees print? And what can they do to make sure it looks good, not like a big gray blob?

I'm looking for good, practical advice here ... constructive stuff.

Gold stars

Sometimes, in the rush to correct errors, prevent problems and improve content, workflow and the look of the paper, we get bogged down in what's WRONG in the paper every day. Pointing out weak points and errors are a vital part of improving our work, but we also need to hear about the good things being done by the desk, and there are a lot of them.

Here's just a few things:

*Liz spent a good 20 minutes Thursday night chasing down corrections for an obit in Marshfield. This included talking to the editor, the person who put the obit in the system and the funeral home (twice!).

*Benton's been getting props from all over for his cutout work on 1A refers.

*Andrew keeps us abreast of what's going on in the world and makes sure we always have an eye on what's live including Olympics (I think we saw every one of Phelps' races), convention coverage, Packers games and Bush's speech last night. He also moves effortlessly between news and sports, keeping the two departments on course with each other.

These are just a few examples of the good things being done by the desk each night. If you see something in the paper that you love (as well as any problems) don't hesitate to let someone on the desk know. I'm going to try to do a periodic 'gold stars' post, so if you're aware of something great, just let me know.

Keep up the good work, folks!

--Kristy

Skybox help

Many thanks to the A1 designers who have been following the latest mandate about using cutouts in skyboxes. I think that, on the whole, the pages have had more punch recently. I've spoken to Kerry, Benton and Kristie about "fading" cutouts and have seen them use the technique very nicely. If you would like a refresher on this process, see me.

With this change in skybox strategy, I've also been asked about providing a few more "hammer" style headings that could be used. In the interest of expanding your page design arsenal, I've assembled a few skybox designs, with various heading styles, in an InDesign file titled Skybox08.indd that you'll find under Graphics/Daily Graphics/SKYBOX ITEMS. Feel free to copy this file to your desktop to take apart and use as you wish.

Another good place to find some out of the ordinary typography is in the Old rail items folder that is in the same SKYBOX ITEMS folder. Feel free to borrow designs and type from these InDesign files as well.

Keep up the good skybox work.

— Brian

Is that your final answer?

Our online budget system, while providing many wonderful ways to stay ahead of the news, does have a problem and that is that we, the copy desk, can't tell if a budget is finalized. We have various ways of dealing with this (badgering the editors, calls, etc.) but I'm wondering if we can't create a standard that will allow editors to communicate their budgets to us.

I think the Rapids method is the best, and that is to e-mail a finalized budget to the entire desk, This tells us when the budget is final, and also ensures at the entire desk knows what is on the menu for Rapids. We can then check the other budgets to make sure any stories from the other sites aren't being held (and if they are we can contact editors early in the night). If they request wire stories (or localize wire stories) for a local page the wire editor knows about it and this helps prevent doubled stories.

In my opinion, this works best when it comes to budgets. What do others think? Is this something we can implement at the other sites or is there a better system?

--Kristy

Hyper about hyphens

Over the course of my editing and being edited yesterday, I had some hyphen-related episodes that I'd like to share:

1. AIG Travel Guard is not hyphenated, according to their own Web site. It's inconsistent across our text archives, and seeing as how this is a big story right now (especially in Point), it's important to keep it consistently correct. (Thanks to Kerry for putting my feet to the fire on this last night.)
2. The AP stylebook is a bit fuzzy in what to do with hyphenating "grade" and "grader," and you have to read between the lines of their examples a bit to know what they mean. A word like "fifth-grader" is always hyphenated. However, "fifth-grade" as an adjective is hyphenated, where "fifth grade" as a noun is not, because the adjectival form is a compound modifier. (It bears pointing out that the examples given for "fifth-grade" are only for the adjectival form, not the noun.) So you would say, "He visited the fifth-grade class," and "He is in fifth grade."

Yes, they are only hyphens, but it is our job to sweat the small stuff.

Beyond the AP Stylebook

Since we tend to follow AP style almost exclusively (can anyone list exceptions?), I find it helps to be familiar with http://www.apstylebook.com/ask_editor.php

While the site allows online subscribers to ask an editor questions, even those of us who are not online subscribers can use the site to find answers to many style questions the AP Stylebook doesn't cover.

A couple of things I have learned:

* The N in "Nativity scene" should be capitalized.
* When listing Republican, Democratic and Independent political affiliations, Independent should be capitalized.
* Even though Wal-Mart recently changed its logo to look like "Walmart," AP is sticking with Wal-Mart (based on a recent SEC filing).
* Theater is lowercase in Pacific theater.
* Items on a bulleted list should begin with a capital letter and end with a period.

Of course the site doesn't have an answer to every style question you could imagine, but a quick search often can help clear up confusion.

~ Elizabeth

Obits

We recently were instructed that paid obits were being edited too much, which can cause problems with families and credits. This is completely understandable, but my question is, how much editing should we be doing with obits? Currently, we're changing a range of things from punctuation, time/date/place arrangements, spelling corrections, grammar and other things. Should we be doing this? At the other sites, especially on weekends, we sometimes get a wide range of obit styles. How do we handle that?

I used to follow the line that if it wasn't an error in fact (6 names when there are only supposed to be 5 kids, names spelled wrong, wrong dates for wars, wrong days of the week) that I left it alone. I then was rebuffed by people who were editing the pages to correct the smaller things, too. Where do we draw the line?

I think we should have firm guidelines on how to edit obits , and how far we want to take it. I for one, am in favor of leaving them alone completely (unless there is a glaring error in fact). What does everyone else think?

--Kristy

oops

the previous post is mine.

--Kristy

Death takes a holiday

On Sunday we got a call from the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department because we had listed the wrong person as being dead on our Web site in the story about the fatal car crash in Merrill. We had the daughter/driver as dead when, in fact, the mother/passenger had died. I made the changes, which ended up being very extensive and updated the Web site (thanks to Andrew for his help on the front page of the site). The person I spoke to was very confused how we got the wrong person since he said the press release was correct.

My question is how do we, as copy editors who do not usually deal with live postings, or press releases,
answer questions like this when there are no editors or reporters in the building?

The other thing is just a reminder to make sure to look at our Web site, especially on weekends. Since we didn't see the press release, we probably wouldn't have caught the problem, except that the general public was talking about the wrong names in the comments section. If someone had been looking through the site periodically, they would have noticed the problem, although I'm not sure how much of this should fall onto the desk. It seems this would be more of a task for the editor/reporter, but regardless, the copydesk should at least be familiar with what is on the site.

Anybody have any other ideas about how to avoid this problem in the future?

Panty raid?

While editing an obit today, I found "panty" instead of "pantry" in a reference to where memorials may be made. Oops. That's one that spell check won't catch, unless you tell it to.

You can flag words in NewsEdit that are likely to make us go red in the face if they make it into print in the wrong context.

In NewsEdit, go to Utilities and drop down to "Edit Spelling Exceptions." In the space provided, type in the word you want spell check to stop on. In my list, I have "pubic" and "panty." (You can add as many as you'd like, but these are a couple I find to be problematic. Let me know if you have other handy ones that I can add.) Click Add and then close the window.

Next time you run across that word in spell check it will stop and you can determine if it's really a panty you want or a pantry.

Mystique