Category: Journalism 4406

This past week was a light one for me on the copy desk. I left Columbia on Thursday afternoon to go home to Georgia and see friends, family and that incredible football game, so I only worked Tuesday afternoon. I worked on one package that day: photos of Battle High School's band. I created a typical photo gallery, but because the piece was to be the home page centerpiece that evening, I then had to write a "story" with information from the captions — Django doesn't like putting media files as centerpieces, apparently. I hadn't previously been aware of the need to create article files for photos, so I was glad to have the opportunity to work with that. I also built the home page for the website that evening.…

Nothing too exciting happened during Tuesday's copy desk shift. I made a conscious effort to consider the "bigger picture," in continuing with the theme of last week's post, and spent a lot of time thinking of how I could further improve headlines, even if they were OK to begin with. For example, using the thought process I discussed last week (What is this about that makes this different than other stories and that would make readers want to read more about it?), I modified a headline about a football player speaking about his injuries. The revised version gave readers a teaser about what sped up his recovery, making it more about the content of the speech than the event he spoke at. I got to do some "big-picture" editing Thursday…

Tuesday's copy desk shift went fairly smoothly with no major (or memorable) issues. (Part of "making the turn" of knowledge, right?) Thursday's shift brought another long story — this time, a profile about a widow still maintaining the farm and alpaca herd she ran with her husband. It was done well and, itself, brought few questions (though I learned a Piper Cub is a type of airplane and AP does not use "widower" to distinguish gender) — most of my time spent on it dealt with headlines and other "bigger-picture" issues. Monica and I talked about focusing on improving headline writing and macroediting in my portfolio review this past week. We agreed that, at this point, much of the microediting is almost mechanical for me and that I know what…

Headlines. They need to attract attention so people will read the story the headline is for, and yet they're so hard to write. I would know — I spent a lot of time on them this week. We published a story Tuesday afternoon about an MU student whose hometown was affected by the Colorado floods. We put a fairly bland but SEO-friendly headline on it for the story ("Colorado flooding hits home for MU student"), but I was asked to work on a more attention-grabbing headline for the website's home page — it was to be the centerpiece that evening. Monica and I spent maybe 15 or 20 minutes coming up with an alternate headline that wasn't too wordy. We wanted to make the identity of the student more personal…

News content was a bit slow Tuesday, so much of my time was spent editing "Show Me the Records" pieces in advance. What are "Show Me the Records" pieces? Each week, advanced reporting (or sometimes general reporting) students highlight a different public record that could be useful to residents of mid-Missouri. The pieces are meant to be short and straightforward. In some of them, the wording didn't make the content of the records clear, so I visited the websites where those records can be found and did some sleuthing to see how I could make the content more clear for the reader. I spent all of my Thursday shift on the ICE (interactive copy editing) desk. I read mostly obituaries and sports stories. The story I spent the most time…