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”.

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.

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

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.

Quick unthought-out thought

Would online subbing or copy-editing stand as a separate operation or service? One that produces story-specific facts checked by a team of online sub-editors who check back to the source, cite them, note the current level of verification and update online in real time. One that also offers a paid-for, story-by-story service to news organisations who’ve sacked their subs or need top-up help?

Not sure but ended up blurbing on about it anyway in my response to Chris Cramer of Reuters on editorial integrity in the new world.

How removing links can land you in court

Step 1: The New Statesman removes links to Wikileaks after the threat of a libel action by the subject of the post – an Iraqi-born businessman.

Step 2: Wikileaks (who weren’t threatened with the same court action) accuses The New Statesman’s link removal as defamation because they say it suggests their content was inaccurate.

Step 3: Watch your poor sub-editing back at every turn!

Full story on The Register…

So you think you’re a good sub?

Would you have checked the Sarah ‘Africa is a country’ Palin story? Turns out this top tale is a hoax anecdote by a fake advisor to McCain, name of Martin Eisenstadt – allegedly checkable with a bit of surfing around the online joint. The wind-up perps, real names Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish, blame sloppy work by traditional news media and by bloggers:

“With the 24-hour news cycle they rush into anything they can find,” said Mr. Mirvish.

Maybe just mention this story if any web types tell you that checks and edits are a ‘nice to have’.

It actually got me feeling sorry for the hockey mom. More on the story at the NY Times…

PS I can see a potential future of disclaimers – ‘Status for this story: unverified’. For copy editors, perhaps the line is: if the story sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

PPS Status of this post: unverified and slung up as soon as I heard the news from BhamPostJoanna on Twitter. Cheers Jo G

Google wants more copy editors – not less!

Why? Because its Googlebots aren’t able to do the job of traditional editors and are, in fact, at the mercy of misinformation published direct to Web by news companies in the rush to inform.

Incorrect tagging and unchecked facts have led to major problems, as reported on the editorsweblog following the World Editors Forum.

Despite the ongoing deletion of subs/copy editors from newsrooms, it turns out that Google’s reps at the WEF reckon editors and fact-checking are more important than ever.

It’s a thought backed up by Pete Clifton, senior BBC News exec, who supports journalist gate-keepers (aka editors?) for processing its UGC:

It’s gone through all the filters that our journalism would have gone through. It’s quite labour intensive. We’ve another arm of our newsgathering operation – it can ultimately add to the richness of what we do, but we shouldn’t take it lightly.

Because taking it lightly would compromise the brand’s trustworthiness as well as making it potentially legal liable.

Can’t help thinking that although subs are seen as an editable expense at the moment, those who find money in the budget for them will win in the long run, because, y’know, you like to know where to go to get the facts. Or am I deluding myself?

The lazy sub’s guide to keeping it legal online

Don’t get banged up the slammer. Here’s a handy 10 tips for media law online post, courtesy of Richard Sharpe of ETC – just in case you need an update from print subbing.

‘I would not become a sub-editor now…

… The future for sub-editing is bleak,’ said Justin Williams, assistant editor of the Telegraph, at the NMK ‘What happens to newspapers?’ event. [Full story here.]

The reason? Because The Telegraph is trialling a post-moderated sub-editing system online in which reporters publish directly to the online edition and await moderation.

Whether moderation is by users via comments or subs direct into the story isn’t clear (to me anyway). But what is noted is that ‘[The future] will not be about the interminable multi-staged editing process’.

Williams notes instead a trend towards content generation (a theme visited in earlier posts as subs are shifted into multi-tasking).

But while newspapers have a brand and quality to protect, they are likely to suffer an amateurisation in the quality of their content through the publish-then-filter model. While this may be acceptable in a fast-paced news environment, which can be corrected over time in a rolling news story, the model could be dangerous for certain topics areas (eg, medical stories), but also for client magazines and websites with a brand to protect.

I don’t agree that the production process has to be ‘interminable’ but a second pair of eyes at least should be in place. Once it’s out there, wrong information goes to RSS almost immediately and an edit even a minute later won’t appear. As a writer I’d be very wary of sending in work without at least some kind of checks in place.

As for client-branded media, they may risk their good name and trusted reputation if they follow The Telegraph’s lead.