How is the sub-editor doing in the digital age?

How is the sub-editing craft doing in the digital age? Well, subs may be thin on the ground but in some places, at least, good sub-editing is still alive and kicking. Here’s my article in the latest edition of InPublishing on how the Irish Independent group has taken out the production layer but worked hard to keep up subbing standards. 

Daily Mail looking for subs and reporters

The Daily Mail is once again looking for trainee subs and reporters. The paper begins its search this week for bright wannabe journalists to join its highly successful training scheme, run by Press Association Training. The subbing course has been running since 2003 and the reporting course is in its fifth year. The Mail's newsroom is now staffed by many of those who completed the training including deputy sports editor Mark Alford, sports journalists Alex Kay and Laura Williamson, backbenchers Jayme Bryla and Chris Roberts and current Young Journalist of the Year, the Mail on Sunday's Matt Sandy.
If you are interested in applying send your CV, 200-words on why you want to be a Mail journalist and six pieces of your work to sue.ryan@dailymail.co.uk by February 10. You should specify your preference, if you have one, for the subbing or reporting course. They are separate schemes which will start next September. The reporting course will be held in London and the subbing course will be held mainly at the PA's Manor in Howden, East Yorkshire. For the first time there will be one combined week with subs and reporters getting together at Derry Street. It is likely that the successful applicants will have completed a post-graduate journalism course or have newsroom experience. Shorthand and a driving licence will be an advantage for the reporters. If you are applying it is worth reading my piece on what the Mail is looking for here. If you get invited for interview, I look forward to seeing you in February. Good luck. 

Ten tips for regional editors for 2011

For the last three years I have written a column for the Press Gazette aimed at regional newspaper editorial managers. Each edition it covered a different issue facing editors and how they might deal with them. They included conflict, dealing with difficult people, managing change, recruitment, technology, redesigning the title, sorting out the technology, running the budget and the like. It is a sign of the times that I covered redundancy three times - and was asked by one newspaper group if they could use one of the articles as its guidelines for all managers. The column has now run its course. I have exhausted my supply of tips (some of which are included here). So the last column appears in the magazine this month. I will be making occasional appearances in future. In the meantime, good luck to editor Dominic Ponsford and his team. By not relying on the newspaper industry for its revenue, the magazine is now more forthright and direct than it has ever been. It certainly isn't afraid to ruffle feathers - and is all the better for it.
Here is my last column.

Ten tips for editors in 2011

As we lurch towards a new year, the regional newspaper industry is desperately looking for a flicker of light at the end of what has been a very long and very dark tunnel. But most of the editors I speak to are, quite sensibly, steeling themselves for more of the same. So in this, my final regular column, I offer ten tips for those of you still editing regional titles in 2011.
i) Whatever gets thrown at you - the editor's core job remains the same. Set a vision for the title, tell everyone what it is and give them the skills and motivation to deliver it.
ii) Be an architect of change. No editor was ever remembered for padding the same path as his predecessor. What do you want your epitaph to say? He was a good administrator? He stayed within budget? He presided
over a difficult period with dignity and integrity?
iii) You are only as good as the people around you - motivate and reward the key players.
iv) Journalism has to be paid for. Entrepreneurial opportunities are there both in print and online. Editors need to take an innovative approach to how the company makes money. Relying on advertising departments to
finally bring in more sits vac and ROP will lead only to tears. It may be time to take charge.
v) Continually revisit your content. Set standards and give feedback - protect regular slots to talk to your team about the title; what is working, what isn't and what you want changing.
vi) The atmosphere in the newsroom is down to you. I go into some offices that are like libraries, others that are vibrant. That doesn't happen by accident.
vii) Protect your staff, your title and yourself from outside fads and decisions - including those of the company.
viii) Look after yourself - it is a stressful time and I see editors who don't look as fit and perky as they did a year or two ago. It is too easy to get into the habit of always tackling that extra job or clearing the decks for tomorrow. Stop. Go home to the family, or to the pub, and make sure you get your quota of sleep. A stressed out and burnt out editor is no good to anyone!
ix) Be prepared for the curve ball ... you may have dealt with just about everything in recent years but it isn't over yet. There will be further 'radical solutions' thrust upon you. That is certain. But there may also be opportunities. If a buy-out comes your way, how are you placed? If the next round of ‘innovation’ involves culling editors, how well are you protected?
x) Know when to draw a line in the sand. If you fundamentally disagree with the company and you cannot change it, if the job is making you and your family unhappy, then know when to say enough. Your currency in the outside world is higher than you think. The skills that journalists take for granted are very marketable - even in this climate. There is life after editing (trust me on this one).
It is 21 years since I took my first editor's chair. It had its moments - a press that let the paper down, a sabre-rattling union, a round of redundancies - but it was a walk in the park when compared to editing today.
There are many of you, I know, who do it really well under extremely tough circumstances. Good luck … you deserve much better. 




   

Time to stamp out two-deck syndrome

This front page from the Times & Citizen in Bedordshire has been doing the rounds. I have seen many 'heady heady heady' mistakes but never on the splash. It is, I guess, a symptom of many things happening in the industry. But my beef is over the two-deck syndrome that blights newspapers. Since templating became the quick and easy way to produce pages, managers and even subs have forgotten that layout is a journalistic craft. It should be easy - read the story first, write the best headline you can and then build the page around it. When Concorde crashes into a hotel outside of Paris, you have to get 'Concorde' into the headline. "Fast jet' isn't quite the same. When a killer wheels his victims' bodies to the Regent's Canal is a shopping trolley, you have to get 'shopping trolley' up there. 

Look at the shape of the classic 'Zip me up before you go go.' Terrible, but who cares? If The Sun had adopted this grim two-deck policy we might have had:
Pop star
arrested
Two-deck syndrome leads to lazy words squeezed into inappropriate shapes, it makes news pages all look the same (like wallpaper) and, as the Times & Citizen demonstrates, it turns news pages into a product, with one shape to fit all stories. Layout should be about story telling, not about drawing boxes. Words sell newspapers - but the drip-drip effect of predictable splash headline words such as plans, attacks, boost, drugs, shame, vandals, crash etc have become

bland and invisible on the newsstands. Good headline writers need to use words that build immediate and vivid pictures in the minds of their potential readers. I have hundreds of examples of splash headlines that fail to do this because of two-deck syndrome - a large weekly paper that says ‘Plans promise jobs bonanza’, an evening that says ‘Youth crime blitz boost’. For all the extra sales they brought in, they might as well have just written 'headline headghgh.'

Unnecessary word of the week

Surplus words are hardly rare these days but 'eurosceptic' in this article on Yahoo News, spotted by David Kernek, is certainly worth a mention.

Nigel Farage, a eurosceptic member of the UK Independence Party, verbally savaged Herman Van Rompuy in a parliamentary debate last week, saying the former Belgian prime minister was from a "non-country" and had the "charisma of a damp rag."

Those who have been on our subbing courses know we regularly have a rant about words dropped into copy thoughtlessly. Particular examples include:

A number of cars were damaged. This is a range from one car to as many as there are on the planet. Cars were damaged is three words shorter and, as a plural, more accurate.

Police are currently investigating. The use of the present tense tells us that it is current.

Passing phase. A phase is by definition passing. These meaningless modifiers, such as unexpected surprise, free gift, past experience, appear to be growing in popularity among would-be feature writers.

Company creates new 60 jobs. The Daily Mail's guide for subs has its own take on this: "You should all know by now that there is no such thing as a new report, a new study or new research. It is also crass to refer to a 'premiere of a new film'. The word new should rarely appear in a newspaper."

The Mail guide also has a nice rant about stating the obvious: "In intros concerning household names, never write phrases such as ‘footballer Wayne Rooney’ or ‘supermarket giant Tesco’. Subsequent pars present an ideal opportunity to say  ‘the Manchester United player’ or ‘Britain’s biggest supermarket chain’ so as not to embarrass any readers who have spent the last 15 years on the planet Zog."

And finally from a court report from a London weekly about the murder of two (sic) twins who suffered from 'everyday alcoholism'. The killer used shopping trolleys to dump their bodies in the Regent's Canal, where they lay undiscovered for a month.

Undiscovered? What a terrific story it would be if they weren't. 

Nigel Farage, a eurosceptic member of the UK Independence Party, verbally savaged Herman Van Rompuy in a parliamentary debate last week, saying the former Belgian prime minister was from a "non-country" and had the "charisma of a damp rag."Skip related content

RELATED PHOTOS / VIDEONigel Farage, a eurosceptic member of the UK Independence Party, verbally savaged Herman Van Rompuy in a parliamentary debate last week, saying the former Belgian prime minister was from a "non-country" and had the "charisma of a damp rag."