The Art of Copy Editing

During my first few weeks as graphics producer, I did not realize how many online stories the web department churned out each day and at first was overwhelmed and felt like my fingers couldn't type fast enough to keep up with the amount of content. On Monday, we have an awesome web team and so copy editing has not been that challenging. It's usually simple corrections such as AP style and how a web news article differs from a fun broadcast story. I learned my first week as well which order to write the news stories in and to get the biggest or 'newsiest' story out first. 

So far during my time as graphics producer, I have learned a lot of valuable web technique and how to use the website in general. i think this aspect of the class is very resourceful and useful because I will definitely need to know how to do all this at a job in the future. I hope by the time this semester is over that I will not only be a lot faster at putting up web articles and copy editing, but also that I have a better understanding of the website.

Last week I was video producer for the first time. I guess that I forgot what it was like to be a freshman and really have no understanding of how a newsroom works and how to write, shoot and edit. It's bizarre and really cool to be able to see how far I have come during my time at USC and as producer you are really able to see just how much you have learned. Teaching people how to copy edit for broadcast however is something I need to work on. I found myself just taking charge of everything and doing a lot of things myself when I really should be teaching others first how to do them.

One way of doing this, and we talked about this in class, is to point out the good sentence structure and parts of the story and then showing the MJ how they could better structure the story or explain what exactly a 'tag' means. I found that once I started doing it this way, not only did a lot more get gone, but it was also more efficient and produced an overall better newscast. 

For this next week, I want to think of better ways of teaching and explaining, not only the basics, but also what exactly the story it is about and I want them to edit. I also want to use the board more during the day to better track what and when the videos are coming in so we can assign them right away. I think this will make for smoother transitions. This along with paying individual attention and helping the MJs more, I think will lead to a great newscast, and more a efficient news day towards the end of the semester.