COMM 313: Lecture synopses

Comm 313, Editorial Processes
Instructor: Ross Collins

Lecture synopses

Synopsis One
Writers under deadline pressure often rely on an old hope that "the desk'll catch it." The "desk" is the editor on a newspaper. And most often they do catch the mistakes and problems writers give them. As an editing student you now are "the desk," the final gatekeeper before publication.

Editors working for a variety of publications have many responsibilities.

1. Assuring accuracy. (Collin Powell or Colin Powell?)

2. Trimming unnecessary words.

3. Considering grammar and spelling problems.

4. Correcting inconsistencies, missing facts.

5. Adjusting style to match AP requirements, or "house" style.

6. Watching out for libel.

7. Considering questions of taste.

8. Ensuring the lead is readable and compelling.

9. Weighing questions of fairness and balance.

In addition, most editors have some role in shaping the publication's "view of reality," this is, what the publication believes its world is all about. Sports? Politics? Fishing? Celebrities? Business? Gatekeeping reflects this. Editors also often supervise writers assign stories, and act as a writing coach. Beyond that they write headlines, choose and crop illustrations, and make up pages. Normally they don't do publication design anymore, as most larger publications employ graphic designers.

Good editing is necessary to give a mass media publication credibility and consistency, hallmarks of professionalism.

Synopsis Two
Editors always are faced with constraints which affect how they do their job.

1. Space. Most publishers determine space based on a formula. Most commercial publications base their income primarily on advertising, relying on cover price for only a smaller proportion of income. An advertising ratio is the amount of advertising a publication must produce on average each day, week or month to stay in business. Normally, newspapers maintain a 50 percent ad ratio (50 percent advertising, 50 percent editorial copy); a "shopper" may reach a 70 to 80 percent ad ratio. Editors fill the space left after the ads have been laid in.

2. News mix. The publication's view of reality translates into the news mix, what that publication will and will not publish.

3. Advertising. Size of a publication normally determines power wishes of advertisers have over its editorial content: large publication can remain more independent than small one. Some magazines arrange "trade-offs," promising to publish an article in return for an ad. Others include prominent brand names in photographs and illustrations. Many publications produce specialty tabloids or magazines as a vehicle for advertising revenue.

4. Traditions and publisher's whims. Editors learn the rules (often unwritten) of what a publication wants from senior staff and supervisors. Some publishers (owners) dictate specific wishes ("no photos of cats; I hate cats"); others do not.

5. Prejudices of the editor. We all have biases, either admitted or unconscious. Editors need to carefully examine their own biases, and try no avoid letting them influence the gatekeeper role.

Synopsis Three
Editing instructors often recommend editors read an article three times: first for a general idea of the story's content; second to edit; third to make sure everything is all right and no new errors were introduced through the editing process. In practice, most editors in mass media publications with tight deadlines don't have time to read a story more than twice, perhaps only once.

Editors sometimes are tempted to edit, because that's their job, but they need to remember the general rule: "It's not your story." Just because you wouldn't have used those words doesn't mean you should change them; that demoralizes reporters. If you think major changes are necessary, it's best to discuss the article with the writer. However, on deadline, sometimes you can't do that. If you need to rewrite, it's helpful to look through the rest of the story for words the author would use, instead of simply substituting your own words.

General concerns: Is the story accurate and complete? Are names spelled correctly? (The phone book is usually correct.) Are examples of passive voice easily changed to active? (Passive voice is sometimes appropriate, however.) Is it in good taste? (An editor once told me editors need to have "dirty minds," to catch double entendres. Famous car accident headline based on northwest Minnesota towns: "Fertile Woman Dies at Climax.")

Synopsis Four
Headlines ("heds" in journalese) may be difficult to write. Not only must they be specific, sprightly and accurate, but they must fill the space available for them, being neither too long or too short.

Mass media editors normally deal with three kinds of headlines: standard, feature and label.

Standard headlines represent the kind of head we've grown accustomed to: sentence style, present tense, no articles, normally no time element. Example: Senator criticizes farm bill. Of course, we never talk this way in real life, but headlines have become so familiar to us that we easily accept their artificial construction suggesting timeliness of the present for events that actually happened in the past.

Feature heads usually are written in the same fashion, but editors try to find amusing puns or turns of phrase to attract readers to feature or lighter stories.

Label heads read like book titles: no verb (or gerund), articles okay. Example: The tax question. Magazine editors often use the label style, or editors working on opinion pages.

Headline writers have some flexibility over writers because they are so constrained by space. Passive voice is more accepted in heads (though active voice is still best), numerals okay, abbreviations okay. Capitalization is sentence style--first word and proper nouns only capitalized.

Headlines are specified using the pica/point measurement system: 12 points to a pica, 6 picas to an inch. Standard point sizes for body text: 5 ("agate" type), 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, (most common body text), 11, 12. Large point sizes are reserved for heads: 14, 18, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, 60, 72, 84, etc.

In addition to point sizes, two other numbers indicate head size: number of columns (width of head), and number of lines. For instance, a 3-36-2 head is 3 cols, 36 pts, 2 lines.

Most type (except monospaced faces) is designed to fit proportionally to the size of the letters--m and w are larger, for instance, and i and l are smaller. Editors traditionally calculated size of heads based on unit count. Maximum units for various heads in a specific typeface (font) are listed in a publication's headline schedule, or "hed sked." While most unit counting is done automatically nowadays by computer, hed skeds still indicate acceptable heads for the editor's publication. For instance, on our sample hed sked, a 4-14 head is not listed--because four columns of 14 pt type would be considered unattractive.

Synopsis Five
Conflicting viewpoints between editors and photographers in the past sometimes led to spirited discussons regarding the importance of words over pictures. That's perhaps less true today, as editors realize the increasingly significant role photos and illustrations play in attracting readers to a mass-media style publication. Editors find photos and illustrations either by relying on full-time staff members, relying on free-lancers, relying on stock agencies, or even relying on clip art--although that last one usually looks rather unprofessional, and many editors prefer to avoid it. Downloading images from the 'net usually violates copyright law, and editors can be sued.

Photojournalists normally are highly-trained visual specialists who work with editors to provide illustration ideas, sometimes also relying on input from an illustrator or art director. The visual people may choose photos and illustrations, but often the editor also is expected to choose quality images. Tips on choosing and using photos:

Avoid choosing poorly exposed or out of focus images. Publication only makes them look worse.
Reject "grip 'n grin," "dead fish" and group shots.
Reject "beefcake" and "cheesecake" shots--even though more and more underclad models and movie stars seem to be essential to marketing nationally distributed magazines.
Avoid mugshots, if possible--ask photographers to provide a portrait of a person doing something.
Crop carefully, to emphasize a simple, easily understood center of interest--the "poster effect."
Print photographs large enough so that their impact attracts readers: in tabloid or broadsheet publications, at least 2 cols for a vertical, 3 cols for a horizontal. Mugshots as an exception can be 1 col or even 1/2 col "runaround." (Text wrap.)

Editors always include cutlines with photos. Standard style is present tense, like heads, but with articles in normal sentence style. Idents are necessary if people in the photo are large enough to be easily identifiable. Cutline writers try to describe something beyond the obvious, keep cutlines fairly short, and avoid unnecessary phrases such as "this photo shows" or "above is depicted." Try to include a byline with every photo.

Synopsis Six
Editors need more and more to understand contemporary page design; it's not just throwing words on a page until it's full. It's interesting to note that while we today think of words and images separately, at the dawn of written language they were the same. Pictographs depicted abstracted images of actual objects, which later became ideograms. So a pictograph of an ox could later come to mean food.

China still uses ideagrams, but its cumbersome demand that readers and writers learn thousands of characters led early western scribes to develop a remarkably different concept: instead of letters depicting what an object looks like, why not let abstract images (letters) depict what an object sounds like? Ancient Phoenicians (1600-1000 B.C.) designed such an alphabet, adapted by ancient Greeks and, in turn, adapted by Romans. Today our alphabet has changed remarkably little from that of ancient Rome.

Type terminology is related to a time when printing was done using metal slugs "hot type"). Type sits on a baseline, includes upper case and lower case letters. Some lower case letters such as p's and q's have descenders below the baseline, while others, such as h's and t's, have ascenders. Serifs are small lines at the end of letters, while counters or bowls are areas inside closed letters, such as p and b. Lower-case g's and a's come in one-story or two-story form. Letters designed as one, such as fi, are called ligatures. Type is measured in points; x-height of type is the size of a lower-case x, even if the stamp it sits on is larger. Space between lines of type is leading (pronounced "ledding"), and designated in points: 10/11, or "ten on eleven," is 10-pt type with 1 pt of leading between each line. A font, variation of the foundry where metal type used to originate, is strictly speaking one particular point size of type, say 10 pt times. The general design of type is more accurately called a type face.

Letterforms today are divided into five broad families (view samples of each family as a PDF file):

roman;
sans serif;
Egyptian or slab serif;
blackletter;
script.

Roman is most important and, in fact, is further divided into three variations: old style, transitional and modern. Old style looks most like hand-drawn letters with flat-nibbed pens, emphasizing oblique slanting, less difference between thick and thin areas, and no brackets. Modern style is straight, includes a pronounced difference between thicks and thins, and includes no brackets. Transitional is in between.

Common example of an old style roman: Garamond. Common example of modern roman: Bodoni. (Your computer may not render these typefaces accurately; check out this PDF file sample.) Both old and new styles are common nowadays. Old style offers a more traditionally, informal, warm look, while modern offers a formal, dressy, precise look.

Most common roman typeface in today's word processing world is times or times roman, designed in the 1920s for the London Times.

Sans serif was particularly popular in the 1970s, but dates from at least the 1830s. Elimination of serifs was thought to be more simple and readable. It's often used for road signs. Still, as body text, many people claim serif body text is more readable. Most common sans typeface today is helvetica, designed by Swiss artist Max Meidinger in the 1950s.

Egyptian or slab serif type represents a nineteenth-century effort to design type that resembled ancient Egyptian letterforms. It's used today mostly for headlines or nameplates, although can make an attractive body text. Stymie or Clarendon are among most common Egyptian type faces.

Blackletter, sometimes called old English, is type designed to resemble Medieval manuscripts. Rarely of use to editors, it lives on in newspaper nameplates, advertisements, and pub signs.

Script is designed to resemble handwriting. Also seldom used by editors, it appears most often in wedding invitations and advertisements.

A sixth family, miscellaneous, includes everything that won't fit in the other families, as well as dingbats--decorative typographical flourishes such as bullets, arrows, stars, pointing hands, etc.

Synopsis Seven
Editors need to keep track of the wide variety of elements that make up a printed page, and that task is logically called make-up. Page make-up is related to design as architecture is related to construction--the designer says how it ought to be done, and the builder does it. Modern page make-up emphasizes horizontal layout, based on grids (non-printing lines that define space on a page). Grids separate pages into columns; six columns is standard broadsheet, five columns is standard tabloid, three columns is standard magazine, two columns is standard newsletter. Old-style design, particularly for large publications, emphasized vertical layout: mostly one- and two-column stories running length-wise down a page. Nowadays most stories run across several columns, and form rectangular boxes, the principle of modular design.

Editors indicate to compositors (people who actually put elements on a page) where stories, photos, graphics, and any non-advertising material ought to be placed on pages. They do this using small facsimiles of pages, called dummy sheets. The process of moving material onto a dummy sheet is called dummying a page. Editors do this based on column inches, one column by one inch. These pages reach an editor's desk from advertising or business department, where advertisements already have been laid in. Advertising, too, is sold and measured by column inch, and indicated by number: a 2 X 4 ad, for instance, is two columns by four inches, or eight col in total.

As editors lay stories and photographs on a dummy sheet, they keep track of their work on a copy control sheet.

Photographs used to be proportioned to fit space on dummy sheets using a proportion wheel. Now most editors size photos in Photoshop using the Image Size pulldown menu. See instructions in Working with Digital Images.