Editing

Interviewing

As team leader and EIC, I am heavily involved in every step of a new staff-writer’s journalistic process: from interview questions to facial expressions and stance during an interview, from revisions to publication, I’m constantly there for staff writers when they need help getting more emotional, unique quotes. One of my team members last year experienced trouble coming up with questions that would really dig into a person’s experience and provide an interesting angle on a yearly event, Poetry Out Loud. In red, I provided feedback on her questions and introduced my reasoning for those suggested revisions. I constantly challenged her to look beneath just the surface of what she was covering and gather a story that was intriguing and moving.

Revising

A sometimes difficult aspect of working with new writers on staff is reshaping their perception of what a good article entails. There are a lot of cliches to avoid when writing an article (for instance, in the IBET article, editorializing or putting in unfounded assumptions into the piece), many of which are the team leader’s responsibility to spread. Language needs to be powerful but objective, nuanced but established in facts. The following example highlights one of my main objectives as an editor: add flavor to a piece while removing subjective language.

Particularly as team leader, I would juggle keeping up with staff writer articles, revising stories and providing feedback, covering events, transcribing/recording interviews, authoring articles and personal projects, designing spreads and infographics, and writing the cover story every issue with fellow team leaders with the intensity of a junior year workload. Below are some suggestions on an article one of my staff writers wrote concerning the struggles of cheerleading uniforms in late fall weather.

edit 2

Reflective Writer

For our article on the National Graphene Research and Development Center (NGRD), MiJin and I had to be incredibly careful about crafting an intriguing narrative while remaining completely objective. The numerous, heavy revisions to our article occurred over the span of several weeks; while research took two weeks and writing it took a week, this article underwent drastic changes from our personal editing process as well as from our adviser’s comments. The leading paragraph (Figure 1) was to prevent any perception that I had a conflict of interest at heart; though I had been initially opposed to NGRD, by the interviewing process, I was neutral about the organization. The opener and our article were continually revised for brevity, clarity, and objectivity.

Revision Process:

  1. Outline: what story are we trying to tell, and how do we tell it?
  2. Reread: reread as a new reader and/or from the other side. how does the article flow? where is the language biased? simultaneously mark hiccups along the way.
  3. Revisit: fill in gaps, resolve comments, comment links & places for multimedia embeds.
  4. Concise: given the attention span of the average reader, cut down extraneous information that doesn’t fit into the outline.
  5. Questions: are there remaining questions left by the piece? if so, insert quotes from master quotes document or conduct follow-up interviews.
  6. Submit: get adviser’s feedback on the revised article.
  7. Repeat: redo steps 2 through 7 until adviser is satisfied with the piece.

Noticing Unnoticed Mistakes

Refer to “Establishing Relationships within the Editorial Staff” in Leadership and Team Building.