Staying on top of your game

Oh boy. No one wants to think that the role they spent their entire career perfecting is just no longer needed. And even if it actually is needed, it's superfluous when reflected in the Bible of budget.



That appears to be the way the copy desk is going. Having lots of skills is being ground into the heads of new graduates. They show up to internships with slow-to-embrace-the-new papers and can't believe they are asked to do so little, when they know how to do so much. At least that's the way I felt after graduating and getting into my reporting internship.

But copy editing. Seriously? Joe Grimm, who writes a daily column for Poynter Institute focused today's submission on skills copy editors should have to stay relevant. I can tell you, my frustration is immense with the level of copy editing that happens some afternoons, so I can't imagine a newsroom without a skilled team of copy editors behind the scenes, saving the day.

Media General made a few headlines when it announced last week it would combine copy editing and page design at three eastern newspapers. This is nothing new, or surprising. We do that here. But one may argue that our copy editing suffers. No one has time to spend looking up every single thing in a story, so easily avoidable mistakes, (such as where a person whose name is all over the Internet, really works) become a regular part of our product.

Grimm suggests copy editors brush up their web skills as they are going to need those a lot more than an AP Stylebook before too long. One such suggestion is to learn search engine optimization. Google has a page devoted to dos and don'ts here.


An old friend of mine started doing this work, and the script he's using is directly from this warning page from Google. Basically, it is making your page easy for search engine bots to locate. For those trying to take advantage, the promise is they can get you on the first page of hits on Google.

I think the concept Grimm is referring to is being aware of the ways in which bots find and catalog items on your Web page. Driving up Internet traffic appears to be the way many newspapers are looking to approach the next stage in profitability and information dissemination. For this, I think our paper needs to establish a more defined way to add tags to stories on the Web site. I noticed it's all over the place and appears that copy editors are simply adding whatever tags occur to them instead of adhering to some sort of formula.



Think I'll inform myself on this topic. I'll let you know what I find out.