It's coming up on two years since I last worked at a newspaper, and there are certain things I miss.
Copy editing for a newspaper is different than online. A newspaper is one-and-done -- if you miss something, it's often gone until tomorrow. Your story needs to fit a certain size and your headline has to as well. If the headline is more than one line, it's supposed to make sense where the lines break.
There's a certain gaming aspect in it for me. What's the fewest number of words you can take out of a story to make it fit? Once the widows are deleted, is anything else easy to remove?
(A widow is where, at the end of a paragraph, one word kicks over to the next
line.)
This past winter I was in New York for a pair of Division III games and sat next to the writer from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. He was filing on deadline for his Gannett paper, which used the same editing software we did when I was at USAT. So I was looking over his shoulder as we were trying to make his story fit the space while the copy desk back in the newsroom was writing the headline. Felt like I was back in a newsroom.
I even dreamt the other night that I was back at The Tower, which is the student newspaper at Catholic. I was a visitor, not a staffer, but just dying to edit something, anything, and I made my wishes known.
Even though online is on a perennial deadline, and there's a definite rush from that, it's just not the same feeling.
3 comments:
They still have newspapers?
I keep reading blog posts about them dying, so there must still be some out there. :)
From my end of the contract, I also miss a lot of things about newspapers, most revolve around content; but there is also the thing about grammar and facile use of the English language (like knowing that fear and fright mean different things and are not interchangeable), the one-sentence paragraph, the stories missing the part that screams out to the guy reading it at 6:00 a.m., even when the coffee is mostly in the cup, like "how did the gun get past security" and such. Even the obits, a real profit center for any newspaper, is too little, too late. They apparently do not read the NY Times to see who died among those who came from the Twin Cities, nor even who, of world prominence and living in the Twin Cities, died here, but they never miss a dead journalist. I dislike the provincial attitude that it's not news if one of our teams in not involved, and, further, that it is only news if it is one of our professional teams, which includes NCAA D-I.
What I like is that it is fairly consistently on my porch when I get up, though I am sleeping later than I used to. And, I like that it is delivered in a package with the NYT.
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