Category Archives: subbing

The Atlantic: ‘Google Doesn’t Laugh’: Saving Witty Headlines in the Age of SEO

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"If all online searches are literal, what happens to the headlines that involve a play on words? Are those headlines relegated to the print edition, where headline writers have a captive audience? Indeed, as newspapers embrace search engine optimization, and as young journalists are taught to value Google visibility above all else, many copy editors fear that funny headlines are quickly going the way of the classified ad."

Rantings of a sub-editor: A lesson in humility

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"The Guardian subs, so far as I can tell, get stories ready for the web and the paper more or less simultaneously. The stories appear on the content management system marked “web then print”, “print then web”, “web only” or “print only”. But whereas (I think) at other publications the copy is split into two directions and two documents, here it remains as one."

Mediaite: Washington Post Blames Increased Typos On Staff Cuts, SEO

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Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander: "The answer may be less about staffing levels and more about the changing duties of copy editors. Gone are the days when they primarily detected errors and smoothed prose for the next day’s newspaper. Now they must also operate in an online environment where 'search-engine optimization' is a key goal. That requires new skills and time-consuming additional duties. ... This week, The Post will begin search-engine optimization training for the entire newsroom. Front-end help from reporters and other staff should ease the burden on copy editors."

Nieman Journalism Lab: How The Huffington Post uses real-time testing to write better headlines

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"here’s something devilishly brilliant: The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees."

CounterValue: Is the FT’s Newsroom 2009 the silver bullet?

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Justin Williams: "There is no reason why, with sophisticated spelling, style and grammar engines like Tansa, reporters cannot self publish stories directly to the web without a second pair of eyes. ... We’re getting close to this on the Finance channel at the Telegraph ... What has and continues to hold this up is the technology. Editorial CMS suppliers continue to market products that, although making the process of web publishing easier and faster, still rely upon the buyers maintaining large production departments to manage the print pages."

Journalism.co.uk: FT plans for new ‘web ready workflow’ leaked …

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"FT stories will be filed and edited within the web channel of the editorial content-management system ... by reporters, writers and sub-editors. The story will be updated in this channel before and after it is published, according to the document. ... As reported by MediaGuardian last week, under the new 'create-craft-complete' system, reporters will add hyperlinks, metadata, write draft headlines and, where stories are linked to the CMS' newspaper channel, run basic formatting checks. ... [S]ub-editors will edit, check and revise these elements and add multimedia and interactive features, and be responsible for revising content for print and online."

Press Gazette: Lionel Barber: Reporters’ work must be checked

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"The reporter will write, it will be worked on a by a news editor, then go to subs," [FT editor Lionel Barber] said. ... "We’re not looking at four pairs of hands, but we’re not stopping the revise function. I really want to get away from the idea that we’re asking reporters to sub their own stories. That’s just not true."

Falling Off A Blog: To sub or not to sub?

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Karl Schneider: "I'm definitely NOT saying that subbing should disappear. There are many circumstances where it makes a huge improvement in the quality of the experience (for the reasons described by some commenters on my last post, and others). What I am saying is, as we already know with live TV & radio, subbing is sometimes not appropriate."

Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog: How much is too much? Defining the grey areas in attribution and linking

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"Just how much of other people’s work on external sites can/should you use and how should you attribute in articles?" ... [Tom Whitwell, assistant editor of TimesOnline] ... said the subbing system and workflow in place - used for online as well as print work - meant links often got omitted. But ‘the general policy would be to link out to things’, he said."

currybetdotnet: Reports of ‘the death of the sub-editor’ may not be exaggerated

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Martin Belam: "The importance of subbing is without doubt being diminished. You had to get things right in a purely print environment because you couldn't instantly retract. In a media environment where the shelf-life of a story on the web is significantly greater than that in print, it is much easier to correct as you go along. If technology is transforming nearly every part of your production process and business model, simply drawing lines in the sand and saying "we stay as we are and we won't discuss changing" doesn't guarantee any of us in the news business a future."

Falling Off A Blog: The Web Production Desk

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RBI's Karl Schneider on how to organise web production at B2B magazines: "The web production desk is where I expect to find people who are at least competent at using HTML, CSS and Javascript, who can turn their hand to basic Flash design and who understand the APIs for key online resources such as Flickr and Google Maps, and how to use them to pull together simple mashups."