One thing I’ve been hearing a lot of around the office these days is, “Hey, Alex, where are the feature stories?”
I have to admit, I have not done the best job of injecting the Arts section with feature stories since I took over in August. Perhaps the biggest reason for the lack of features is because of the immense popularity of our columns. In making new designs and more prominently featuring them on the back page, the section has ignored some of the better features we could have run.
This is all going to change really soon. Don’t worry – we’ve got a lot (and I mean a lot) of feature stories on the way in the upcoming weeks and months that I think will really appeal to our readers.
Speaking of improvements, we are also working on new ways of bringing out fresh takes on our current columns. Your favorite columns will be seeing some more festive outings (like the Halloween edition of Hautey Toddy) and more personal takes on the topics (like Alex McAdams’ top 10 indie songs list this week in iWeekly).
Now that I’ve plugged the section enough, I’d like to share one thought on The DM office that you may not believe: we really are trying to put out the best paper each and every day. The quality of my section and the paper as a whole may see good days and bad, but it does not change the fact that we really strive to put out content you, the reader, will enjoy. I normally would not reference all of this a lot, but after last night, I feel like I need to.
Halloween is one of my favorite days of the year, so when I realized that in addition to my classes, I was going to have to go into work on that day, I got pretty annoyed and depressed. I got carried away and began to rush through my section with the goal of getting out as soon as possible. About half way through this, Marti, our editor, came back, put her hand on my shoulder and says “How’s it going?”
She began looking over my pages and giving me tips. I realized while we were doing this that, despite the holiday, we still needed to put out a quality paper the following day. Marti understood this better than I did, but it just goes to show you that we’re not thinking about ourselves when we put this paper together — we’re thinking about you.
I hope you enjoy the section in the weeks ahead!
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
The Other Kind of Late Night
I wish that I could say I stay up until midnight Sunday through Thursday because I have some extravagant lifestyle filled with long nights out with friends having an amazing time, making bad decisions and thoroughly enjoying my last year in college. However, that is not exactly the case.
I spend every Sunday through Thursday night in Bishop Hall at the Student Media Center designing the Daily Mississippian.
It's not the most glamorous job. It doesn't involve any flashy bylines or even my own mugshot. But to me, design is all about subtlety--the subtle changes from day to day that no one recognizes when they are there, but everyone recognizes when something is a little off.
Each day brings new challenges to overcome and new ideas to develop. But, hey, I guess that's just journalism.
And hopefully the next time you pick up a paper before your 11 a.m. class after a long night out, you will appreciate a little more all the long hours, stressful deadlines and hardwork that went into getting it into your hands.
I spend every Sunday through Thursday night in Bishop Hall at the Student Media Center designing the Daily Mississippian.
It's not the most glamorous job. It doesn't involve any flashy bylines or even my own mugshot. But to me, design is all about subtlety--the subtle changes from day to day that no one recognizes when they are there, but everyone recognizes when something is a little off.
Each day brings new challenges to overcome and new ideas to develop. But, hey, I guess that's just journalism.
And hopefully the next time you pick up a paper before your 11 a.m. class after a long night out, you will appreciate a little more all the long hours, stressful deadlines and hardwork that went into getting it into your hands.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Printing the Hard Stuff
It's always interesting to go to class and hear what people have to say about The Daily Mississippian when they don't know you work for it. As news editor, I take these opportunities to learn about what our readers like and don't like, and find ways to improve the publication.
But something particularly struck my interest in my English class today. Our professor had a student read aloud his paper on the topic of modern-day heroes. He took the stance that our society has less heroes and the media is partially to blame. As a local example, he used The DM and how the publication dealt with the Bradley Jameson incident as well as the three students killed in the ATO fire three years ago. The student felt The DM should have ignored the toxicology reports of the students. His reasoning was because it made the situation harder for the students' family and friends and that the information was uncalled for, tarnishing the images of the former students.
It was all I could do to keep my mouth closed.
The DM, like many other newspapers, holds its highest obligation to its readers. To do so, we must print any and all information we obtain about a story we are covering. Whether the information be good or bad, it is our duty to let our readers know what really happened.
Sometimes, this can be hard for our staff. In the Jameson case, we were first told no alcohol was involved - it was an open and shut case. We wrote a brief article on the accident, followed by a profile article about Jameson and how he was remembered by family and friends. Then came the toxicology report. Although some of us were saddened by it, we knew we had to publish it. If we didn't, we would be withholding information from our readers.
As usual, we were criticized for printing Jameson's blood alcohol content.
Just because we print this type of information doesn't mean we like to. It doesn't mean we are trying to sell papers (our paper is free anyway) or make things harder for the victim's family and friends. It just means we are trying to inform our readers the best we can so they can make informed decisions on their own.
But something particularly struck my interest in my English class today. Our professor had a student read aloud his paper on the topic of modern-day heroes. He took the stance that our society has less heroes and the media is partially to blame. As a local example, he used The DM and how the publication dealt with the Bradley Jameson incident as well as the three students killed in the ATO fire three years ago. The student felt The DM should have ignored the toxicology reports of the students. His reasoning was because it made the situation harder for the students' family and friends and that the information was uncalled for, tarnishing the images of the former students.
It was all I could do to keep my mouth closed.
The DM, like many other newspapers, holds its highest obligation to its readers. To do so, we must print any and all information we obtain about a story we are covering. Whether the information be good or bad, it is our duty to let our readers know what really happened.
Sometimes, this can be hard for our staff. In the Jameson case, we were first told no alcohol was involved - it was an open and shut case. We wrote a brief article on the accident, followed by a profile article about Jameson and how he was remembered by family and friends. Then came the toxicology report. Although some of us were saddened by it, we knew we had to publish it. If we didn't, we would be withholding information from our readers.
As usual, we were criticized for printing Jameson's blood alcohol content.
Just because we print this type of information doesn't mean we like to. It doesn't mean we are trying to sell papers (our paper is free anyway) or make things harder for the victim's family and friends. It just means we are trying to inform our readers the best we can so they can make informed decisions on their own.
Inside Copy Editing
A lot of my co-workers here at The DM wrote about job stress, long nights and the feeling that nothing is ever good enough. I've seen my share of that, especially last year when I was campus news editor before the advent of assignment editors. But for my blog today, I want to talk about the often overlooked role of copy editors at The DM and papers everywhere.
In my time here at The DM, I remember many many inquiries as to who was responsible for the grammar, spelling, poor comma usage, misleading headlines and every other AP Style or English language sin under the sun. Essentially, the whole staff is responsible. The person who wrote the deplorable cutline, who originally misplaced the comma and who refused to buy a style book usually gets blamed, and we all move on (hopefully toward better grammar).
This is why The DM, and virtually every newspaper in existence, has some form of copy desk. People make mistakes. As The Daily Mississippian is a daily newspaper we don't always do the type of fact-checking weekly magazines or monthly magazines do, but several people give each article a good, critical read before we go to press. At some magazines, fact-checkers have been known to call back sources to check every little detail. We're proud to trust our reporters on the big picture and use the support of editors for the rest.
After a city editor (or section editor in our case) looks over a reporter's work, a designer puts it on the page, and we get to work our magic. We read each article, first making sure it is readable and belongs in the paper. Our second concern is to check that the language is used correctly, that names are spelled correctly and that nothing looks fishy. Usually, one copy editor will read an article on the computer, decide on an appropriate headline (if it's a news article), and print it to get a second proofread by another editor. Then, the "slot" for the particular section, skims everything, checks the headlines and cutlines and makes a few more changes to the copy. Finally, the section is off to the managing editor and editor in chief who read everything again before we send the paper to the press.
You might wonder, do we even catch anything? After all, the paper you get every day still has several errors. First off, you might want to check and see if your English rules stray from AP Style ones (abbreviating Mississippi as "Miss." instead of "MS" when it follows the name of a city, for example, or leaving off the last comma in a serial). But, we do, indeed, catch a lot of minor things, change a lot of ledes, worry about every word in a headline and, on occasion, nix articles altogether. Here are a few things we caught that were memorable this year:
Charles Dickenson (Dickens)
Roberto Gonzales (Alberto)
Lindsey Lohan (Lindsay)
Oozy (Uzi)
Repel (Rappel)
Kenya Washington (Kyna Washington, LSU volleyball player)
Stephen Cohbert (Colbert)
Brittany Spears (Britney)
In my time here at The DM, I remember many many inquiries as to who was responsible for the grammar, spelling, poor comma usage, misleading headlines and every other AP Style or English language sin under the sun. Essentially, the whole staff is responsible. The person who wrote the deplorable cutline, who originally misplaced the comma and who refused to buy a style book usually gets blamed, and we all move on (hopefully toward better grammar).
This is why The DM, and virtually every newspaper in existence, has some form of copy desk. People make mistakes. As The Daily Mississippian is a daily newspaper we don't always do the type of fact-checking weekly magazines or monthly magazines do, but several people give each article a good, critical read before we go to press. At some magazines, fact-checkers have been known to call back sources to check every little detail. We're proud to trust our reporters on the big picture and use the support of editors for the rest.
After a city editor (or section editor in our case) looks over a reporter's work, a designer puts it on the page, and we get to work our magic. We read each article, first making sure it is readable and belongs in the paper. Our second concern is to check that the language is used correctly, that names are spelled correctly and that nothing looks fishy. Usually, one copy editor will read an article on the computer, decide on an appropriate headline (if it's a news article), and print it to get a second proofread by another editor. Then, the "slot" for the particular section, skims everything, checks the headlines and cutlines and makes a few more changes to the copy. Finally, the section is off to the managing editor and editor in chief who read everything again before we send the paper to the press.
You might wonder, do we even catch anything? After all, the paper you get every day still has several errors. First off, you might want to check and see if your English rules stray from AP Style ones (abbreviating Mississippi as "Miss." instead of "MS" when it follows the name of a city, for example, or leaving off the last comma in a serial). But, we do, indeed, catch a lot of minor things, change a lot of ledes, worry about every word in a headline and, on occasion, nix articles altogether. Here are a few things we caught that were memorable this year:
Charles Dickenson (Dickens)
Roberto Gonzales (Alberto)
Lindsey Lohan (Lindsay)
Oozy (Uzi)
Repel (Rappel)
Kenya Washington (Kyna Washington, LSU volleyball player)
Stephen Cohbert (Colbert)
Brittany Spears (Britney)
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