Pick of the links (12 Feb-22 Sept 2009)

• Web version of a mag production desk
  A suggested migration path for print subs.
• No need for sub-editors – Roy Greenslade
  (with 100 comments adding to the debate)
• The Guardian’s follow-up to Roy’s rant
  ‘Subeditors are under attack from cost-cutting newspaper groups – and Roy Greenslade. So do they have a future?’
• How do you sub live stories – and add value?
  Adam Tinworth on the nature of real-time news.
• A survival guide for sub editors and other curmudgeons
• FT plans for new ‘web ready workflow’ leaked; ‘right first time’ approach for filing copy
  ‘…sub-editors will edit, check and revise these elements and add multimedia and interactive features, and be responsible for revising content for print and online.’
• Automated sub-editing – could this replace you?
  ‘Tansa provides enterprises with advanced text proofing tools.’
• The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
  Say no “more”.

Subslink: 39 strange but true newspaper headlines

Bit of fun after recent rantings. Headlines include, the ridiculous:

Alton Attorney Accidentally Sues Himself

the badly-worded:

Chicken with artifical legs dies a hero

and the intriguiing:

Hairdo kills mum

For the full list, go here.

Journalist, train thyself! Online needs you… desperately!

A few days ago I was asked by The Jobless Journalist about the merging of reporting and subbing in an online environment… and should s/he as a reporter (with some subbing experience) apply for sub-editing roles.

Well, the digital skills gap has been a source of frustration for me for a few months now so I’m afraid the subject rather got me going… it’s very much from a client publishing perspective rather than a multimedia newsroom but here’s the transcript.

And if you don’t want to read 1200 words on future-subbing, then the short version is nicely SEO’d into the header above.

Do you see the divide between reporter and sub lessening with online journalism, ie a reporter needs to be able to sub as content is uploaded directly online?

Firstly, good on you for blogging about this. Not only are you engaging a load of other journalists who are probably pretty damn worried about their trade and their future, but you are opening up many more potential job opportunities for yourself by engaging in the culture of online and learning the skills of digital publishing.

Oh and unless someone’s radically altering your post and headlines, you’re already both reporting and subbing, yes?

Right now, you’re working out for yourself what works in this environment copywise, headlinewise, structurewise. In blogging at least, reporting and subbing tend to be integrated (along with photography, IT skills and social media basics).

Which kind of answers your question on the divide between reporter and sub in online environments. Divide? What divide?

The divide is less about reporting versus subbing, imho, and more about are you engaged or not, are you digitally included or not.

By not engaging more in online environments, traditional journalists are not developing their digital writing or subbing skills, let alone all the other skills that go with publishing to the Web, like:

• picture research under Creative Commons licences
• image manipulation
• linking skills
• SEO knowledge
• how to upload and promote content
• and the big one: the ability to deal with readers talking back to you.

It is an ongoing frustration in my line of work – currently web editor/corporate blogger – that people say they want to work online but don’t have a blog, Twitter account, Tumblr or Posterous, and don’t use feeds, social bookmarking, alerts and other tools to help them be a journalist online.

It’s like trying to write a news story but only occasionally reading a newspaper. Just having a Facebook page isn’t enough, because your readers online will know more than you – and they’ll let you know it.

I came across a great quote to illustrate this in the Top 10 Lies Newspaper Execs are Telling Themselves:

Until you have a blog, a Twitter feed and a Facebook account and until you are reading most of your news online and commenting on what you read, until you are all over Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, iGoogle, Netvibes and the like, until you can actually explain to me how online CPM-based advertising works, until you can explain how SEO and SEM work, until you know what “pwnd” means, until you know the significance of the 3 Wolf Moon or 3 Cat Keyboard t-shirt, you don’t know what you don’t know.

You are competing with the very people who created the Internet.  Increasingly, you are competing with the generation who grew up online.   How can you possibly be so arrogant that you think you can compete in that world without becoming a part of it?

I’ve been actively looking to hire digital subs and SEO-trained writers in the last six months – but I’ve struggled to find people who are really digitally engaged. I sometimes wonder if it’s because journalists tend to rely on mammoth publishing organisations for training. They are not used to going out there and training themselves. (This is where freelances have an advantage – we are used to self-development because it’s a generous publisher who will pay for our training.)

This presents great opportunities for reporters and subs who are looking for online work because in online publishing there is no set path in… at least for the moment while universities get to grips with how to train up the journalists of the future and those who are traditional print journalists move from shock at their industry collapsing either to engaging with the new medium or perhaps, resentfully, having it foisted upon them on top of their usual work.

No one can prescribe you a way into a job in online journalism. No one is asking you to train as a reporter first and perhaps later, when you’ve learnt how to write in a certain style, then train as a sub. There is no discrete set of jobs in online publishing – unless you count the way the digital dept I work for is divided: web editor, developer, designer with a side order of subs who process print stuff easily but need to [find the time to] engage [in online culture] in order to ‘get’ online.

From what I’ve read (mostly on teh Online Journalism Blog – and, subs, you can stet that ‘teh’ – it’s an online thang), reporters in multimedia newsrooms are being asked to sub their own work; meanwhile subs are being made redundant. How reporters are supposed to sub to old-school standards, perhaps with minimal experience or training, and 24-hour newsroom deadline pressures, should be interesting! Would love to be a fly on the wall of the 21st century newsroom. But just on a practical level, I know I find it hard to sub my own work, and I know I’m not alone in that.

Then again, online environments are a different beast. It’s publish first, refine later. You may not be shot for a typo but you do need to know the pitfalls – particularly if you are working for a brand – and this is perfect sub-editor territory.

Does this herald the death of the sub or will there always be the need for a second pair of eyes?

Every bit of copy benefits from a second pair of eyes, imho. But the comments section can act as a rather more public second set of eyes, pointing out your typos and incorrect facts. In a way this is more transparent but it has its downsides.

Personally, I’d love a sub to come along and clean up my typos, SEO my copy for me, add metadata to my content, suggest a better mobile-phone-surfer-headline, keep me out of court then social bookmark my content in relevant places and ways. In practice, this rarely happens – mainly due to the current digital skills gap.

How does freelance subbing compare with a full-time subbing job. Which is easier to get into?
You’re asking the wrong person here as a dedicated freelancer. Freelance subbing is the same for me as full-time subbing except you occasionally have to put up with the ‘just a freelance’ mentality of some employers, and you have to work the British summer as it’s peak time to cover holidays. The pay off is you can (potentially) take months off at a time to travel, write your novel, start a blog…

Easier to get into? Hard to say. The last year has been a difficult one for freelance subs definitely, although there seem to be a few green shoots of recovery around now. All I can say is, it takes balls and bluff to go straight into freelance subbing without having done a full-time stint somewhere first. And that budgets are moving online.

In which case, the ‘jobless journalist’, who’s done a year’s subbing already, and is now visibly blogging for all the world to see, is perfectly positioned for hire.

Good luck with the job search. I suspect and hope you won’t just be blogging for long.

LATE ADD: I left my job last week to go freelance as a blogger and do more social media and content strategy ’stuff’.  Sooo…. my agency is looking for web editors – check out the job advert if you’re interested. And if you’re a freelance sub/writer with a blog, Twitter account and a general immersion in online, then it may be worth sticking in a CV or a link to your site, too.

Free mentoring offered on Ada Lovelace Day

Who was Ada? Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

In celebrating Ada Lovelace Day (March 24), bigging up women in tech, I look back at those I have met since I ‘went online’ as a journalist in 2000.

It’s a short list – unfortunately – but hopefully one that will grow in time. I could choose from Fiona Romeo, Head of Digital Media at the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory; Adrienne Wyper, deputy editor at AllAboutYou.com, Adrienne Grubb, web editor at Redwood Publishing, Joanna Geary, web development editor at The Times; and a couple of others – all journalists who have pioneered their way online in various ways.

But it’s Anita Bevan, now head of content for web and mobile at Orange UK, who I’d like to acknowledge as my first female role model of the internets. Anita gave me my first break as web producer for the women’s portal, iCircle.com, in 2000 and forgave me various freelance absences to invite me back as homepage editor for Freeserve.

I learned so much from that time that has served me well in shifting online for the second time, from sub-editor/writer to web editor. And having a female role model has definitely helped me develop the balls to ‘tech up’. In the meantime, Anita has managed to surf the changes from Freeserve, the UK’s largest portal at the time, to Wanadoo to Orange and the world of mobile content.

The funny thing is, I vaguely recognised her name when I went for that first iCircle interview. In the lift, she seemed even more familiar. I was sure I’d met her somewhere before. Well, she remembered me. Turns out, she had been my personal tutor at the London College of Printing.

So now we’ve been connected for, eek, 21 years. I hope it’s as nice for the Ada Lovelaces of the world to see their charges go forward as it is for us to benefit from their influence. In turn, perhaps we can pass on what we know and help other women make the transition that we have made or are making.

In that vein, I’m offering some one-to-one blog tutorials in my lunch hour to any women/girls/dragqueens, etc, who are thinking of setting up a blog or wondering how to get started online. I’m in the Waterloo area of London (mostly) or in Birmingham (occasionally). Tea/coffee optional. Email me at fionacullinan@hotmail.com to arrange.

Bloggers not filling gap left by journalism

Here comes… Clay Shirky. Clay Shirky’s talk at LSE last night presented something of a logistical reporting first for me – with traditional reporter’s notepad in one hand, mobile Twitter in the other and an Aussie-American sitting next to me who’d wandered in from a cancelled lecture asking who is this Clay Shirky guy and what is Twitter? (if I had a penny…).

Well, Clay Shirky is the author of a rather good book on the interwebs called ‘Here Comes Everybody’. And Twitter is, well, many things to many people – but last night it was a way for me to report and also tune into what others in the room were thinking.

Prof Shirky covered much of what is in the book (the paperback’s just out), including touching on the sea change happening in publishing right now. But last night he expressed little pity for the fall of newspapers:

‘Newpapers are panicking – I mean, 2009 is the year they realise the internet spells trouble for newspapers?!

‘The problems of newspapers are so much of their own making that it’s hard to show an ounce of pity… journalism was not aware of its business model [ie funded by advertising from the likes of M&S]

‘We have to find another way to subsidise journalism… [because] the gap between what journalism leaves and what bloggers pick up will not be filled.’

He cited the example I always use in the ‘what’s the difference between bloggers and journalists’ debate; that local reporters are the ones who go down to the city council house and report on/challenge/ask questions at all those little meetings where agendas are pushed through.

This beat is regularly covered by journalists, with the effect of it being a watchdog, and acting as checks and balances against local council corruption.

Interestingly, he also covered new internet tools and democracy, the rise of factionalism and issues of legitimacy.

On Change.gov, the official website of Barack Obama’s presidential transition project, he points out that the issue the American people most wanted Obama to act on was not Iraq, the collapse of the banks, economic crisis nor any other major pressing issue but the legalisation of marijuana (for medical purposes).

His 5-word summary of his book at the start of the talk was:

‘Group action just got easier.’

And so, people are organising and campaigning and directing their views thanks to new media tools – but, like journalists and the local council, there are currently no checks and no balancing mechanism to say when these views are legitimate, democratic and right to act on. He ended his speech with:

‘I think 2009 is the year we will make some momentous decisions about checks and balances.’

For all the negative press journalism has been getting, and for all its faults, it’s interesting to see it in these terms. As part of the fabric of a democracy and a force for policing local government. This won’t be news to regional journalists, of course, but it might be to parts of the blogosphere.

As for the future for journalism, and particularly the good work that it does, Clay Shirky’s view is that journalism will ‘move towards a more vigorous non-profit model’. The question, as ever, is who will pay?

Pick of the links (18 Nov-22 Jan 2009)

• Could editorial outsourcing save newspapers?
• New media, new business models
• Style guide wiki for online sub-editors
• SEO copywriting 2.0
• 10 things to know and love about copy editors
• Copy editors: the missing link in the online newsroom
• Adapting print for web
• Role of proofreading and copy editing online
• Geotagging explained
• Online brand reputation packages
  
• How to track comments
• Journalists as curators
• Newspapers and the link economy
• ‘Social’ media but trad models are still broadcasting
• American vs English for web content
• Best practice on BBC blogs
• The UK’s most visible web individuals
• How not to score a PR own goal when criticised on the web

‘What will you miss when newspapers are gone?’

Will you miss me, Seth Godin? You don’t seem to mention copy editors, concentrating as you have in your post on the loss of  ‘local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news’.

I am/was a sub-editor who is having to check less and less as life moves online and into endless opinion. My job has all but disappeared. The ‘invisible’ skill – to the readers anyway - of copy editing, checking and proofreading may be missed as reputations fall, libel and copyright court cases soar, stocks crash on the back of incorrect tagging and anal grammar pundits click away in annoyance.

While you’ve obviously done a spell-check on your column, I did have to laugh at:

I worry about the quality of a democracy when the the state government …

And I worry about the quality of ‘the the’ content, and where I will be able to find checked content. I’m not meaning to nitpick. It’s a small example, nothing to bother about. But it’s the trustworthiness, I will miss; the knowing that what I’m reading has been via the lawyers, a copy editor and/or a chief sub-editor.

We can all live with a  few spelling/grammar stuff -ups. But it’s kind of like airlines and maintenance. If the seatbacks don’t work and the carpets are worn, then you don’t care but you do worry about the engine. The trust has gone. 

So I think the ‘invisible’ sub-editor may finally become visible when newspapers are gone – and, even with the tabloid spin, it’s them who I’ll miss. And in case you think I’m feeling sorry for myself, I don’t think that’s it. My job’s already moved on. The sub-editing element has sunk to less than 20%. I’m just another opinionated media outlet now!

Style guide wiki now up for online copy editors

After calling for a universal style guide in a recent post, well, here it is:

Style guide for online sub-editors 

Thanks to journalism.co.uk for the set-up. It’s editable for your learning pleasure and is full of tips, links and explanations for print subs moving over to online. Would be great to hear the input and suggestions of subs and copy editors, or go to the wiki and add your tuppence worth there.

There’s loads of things I haven’t covered, or haven’t covered enough. Please help and make this work-in-progress a useful resource.

Freelancing in the nude?

Nice tablecloth. Pic: Cronewynd/Flickr

Was bemused to listen to the awful Freelance National Anthem - but think the endline is wrong. Freelance writers have the the joy of working in pyjamas. Working ‘in the buff’ is just plain wrong. Or am I being naive?

What do you wear when working from home? And, less contentiously, what time do you get dressed?

Maybe the writer just couldn’t find a rhyme for pyjamas…

Storking the typo-makers

You can publish then edit all you like but, beware, the original may still be ‘out there’ – and there are people willing to spot it, tweet it, snap it, blog it and generally announce it to the world. Like this one from Tom Ackroyd who took a snapshot of a 3News headline typo tonight (since corrected) and uploaded it to Twitpic before tweeting me:

Too heavy for the stalk: newborn weighs in at 6.4kg

Beauty. It makes me think fondly of all those job adverts for sub-editors asking for the ‘ability to spot a literal at 50 paces’.

Even funnier is that the original 50-pace typo spotter uknzguy has pointed out that the error has been immortalised in the URL.

Note to self:  check my permalinks! Thank Buddha, there’s an edit function in WordPress for just this kind of cock-up.