On big news days, headlines seem similar
I love looking at headlines on the Newseum’s collection of front pages the day after a big news event. Maybe it comes from years of working in Detroit, where every morning as an editor at The Detroit...
View ArticleWriting to fit in foreign tongues
مبارك يقول انه سوف يتنحى That’s how the headline “Mubarak says he’ll step down” would appear in Arabic. When big events happen in countries whose languages differ widely from English, I think about the...
View ArticleCopy editors: Calm in the storm
The huge storm that swept across the Midwest last week — in Chicago we call it the Blizzard of 2011 — brought out plenty of heroes in the news business, and among the heroes were copy editors finding...
View ArticleBin Laden news: Copy editors at the 11th hour
Look at all the May 2 front pages at Newseum, or even in this small sampling of the May 2 front pages, and it’s amazing how many giant “Bin Laden killed” headlines you’ll see or variations thereof....
View ArticleProviding ‘cleaner copy’ no substitute for sub-editors
It’s at once disturbing and, in that odd way, comforting to see our Australian sub-editing colleagues suffering as we American copy editors are, with word that two of Australia’s biggest newspapers,...
View ArticleA few rules up with which I will not put
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...
View ArticleSydney journalists stand up for sub-editing
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...
View ArticleCan text-to-speech cut errors in stories?
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...
View ArticleIs the night copy desk dead?
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...
View ArticleCreate your own news wire with Twitter
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...
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