ACES 2009, Day 2 Morning Sessions
Posted in Travel, Work on 05/01/2009 11:28 pm by Peggy HuBRAIN SPEED BUMPS
Started the morning by attending Merrill Perlman’s session on “brain speed bumps.” She presented several stories that contained mistakes and asked the audience to find them. I had a terrible time with every single one of the exercises and am thoroughly embarrassed. I hope that the problem was that I wasn’t quite awake at that hour rather than that I’ve lost my edge as an editor!
Perlman gave a list of things that should set off alarm bells for editors and indicate that something should be double-checked in a story:
– Coincidence
– Internal inconsistency
– Repetition
– Superlatives and modifiers
She also advised editors always to check names, foreign languages, and things that are often corrected in their own publications. Perlman also warned that errors often travel in pairs.
BLOGGING ETHICS
The second morning session I attended was titled “Blogging Ethics,” and featured Bryan Murley of Eastern Illinois University, David Sullivan of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Bill Walsh of the Washington Post.
Murley started off by comparing blog entries with print articles. Blogs entries, he said, are written in a personal style, are shorter than news articles, include hyperlinks to other stories, are narrowly focused, and can contain multimedia such as videos or audio clips.
Murley said copy editors can help bloggers by:
– authenticating links
– editing copy before it goes live
– “adding to the link economy” (giving primary sources to draw readers back to the piece)
– gauging comments
– tracking online conversations about a topic
Murley also discussed Twitter. Twitter is a conversation, he said; do NOT dump your RSS feed into Twitter. Instead, manually post selected items on Twitter with headlines written to lure readers, and engage people on Twitter in conversations. (Julio Ojeda-Zapata also made this point in the “Twitter for Journalists” session yesterday.)
Bill Walsh talked about his own experiences writing The Slot, a blog about errors he finds in copy. He noted that bloggers write about things in which they are interested, and often they are unofficial experts in the subject. This is in contrast to regular reporting, in which writers are sometimes assigned stories about which they know nothing.
David Sullivan discussed workflow. How can publications feed Twitter and update blogs quickly while ensuring the accuracy and fairness of the material being published? These things don’t go through the normal editing process, but there still needs to be some sort of editorial review for them before they go live. Sullivan also brought up the difference between objectivity and fairness. People have their own opinions about everything; it is part of human nature. We cannot really be objective. But we should always try our best to be fair in our coverage.
Other topics discussed included how to handle blog comments and whether to notify readers when a story on the Web has been changed.
