Photo: flickr/Nic McPhee

These days, journalists have fewer editors looking over their work. Some media outlets have almost done away with copy editors all together. That means it’s more important than ever for journalists to learn how to self-edit, and turn in clean, accurate copy. onMedia’s Kyle James has some tips on finding your inner editor. 

Journalism has always been a fast-paced profession. But since the advent of the internet, it’s attained light speed. Getting content up fast is more important than ever, but that can mean that there are fewer sets of eyes going over content before it’s published. Plus, there are fewer copy editors around these days than there used to be as newsrooms trim their staffs due to financial pressures.

The result: more mistakes are slipping through. While sloppy copy is embarrassing, it can also damage a journalist’s or outlet’s credibility and drive readers to the competition. No one wants that.

That’s why learning how to edit your own copy instead of depending on others to clean up your mistakes is more important than ever.

Studies have shown that it’s very, very easy to miss errors. Our brains have the brilliant ability to straighten out messes they encounter. I bet you don’t have that much problem reading the jumble below.

It dseno’t mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm.

Photo: flickr/Terrance Heath

Let’s hope none of your writing turns into looking like that. Still, it’s likely that there will be a few typos or inaccuracies that sneak through. No one’s perfect, after all, so as I like to say: To err is human; to self-edit, essential.

Here are a few tips you can use to make sure that the work that goes out under you’re (oops, that should be “your”) byline is error free and crystal clear.

Print out, step away, proof

If I’ve got the time and have a printer handy, I like to print my stories out. Then I’ll go get a coffee, play with the dog or even call it a day. I need that break from the computer screen and my words to put a little distance between the story and me. How long I stay away depends on what my deadline is. I like to sleep on it and look at it with fresh eyes in the morning, but that’s not always possible.

But reading it on paper instead of the screen I wrote it on gives it a new context, and you’d be surprised about the things you’ll catch. Some people like to change context to going to a different location, such as a chair in the living room or maybe a park outside—anywhere but the desk where you wrote it. This gives things a new perspective.

Change the format

If printing it out isn’t possible or you’d prefer to save paper, try changing the font in your word processing program. You could also bump up the font size from 12 to 16 points. Or, try changing your computer settings so instead of reading in black and white, you’ve got a light blue background and dark green letters. (I wouldn’t make this change permanent!) The key it to fooling the mind into thinking it’s looking at something new, not the article it’s been slaving away on.

Read it aloud

Photo: flickr/Jeff Daly

As a radio producer, this is an essential for me. But even for print or online pieces, reading your text out loud can help. It can make sure that the words flow smoothly through the piece, and when you stumble over something, like a difficult word or phrase, that’s a good clue that maybe it should be rewritten. Also, I think you’re more likely to catch spelling and grammar errors when you’ve got to pronounce what you’re reading. It slows you down a little and the eyes don’t fly over the page as quickly as they do when you read silently.

Read it backwards

This is mentioned in several sites and posts on self-editing, although I don’t have first-hand experience with it. But apparently, if you read your copy backwards—the last sentence, then the second-to-last sentence, etc.—your focus beams in laser-like on each individual sentence and you catch errors. You’re going against the flow of the narrative, and don’t skip over information. It’s also effective for fact checking, many say.

Use spellcheck (but don’t trust it 100%)

Getting the spelling right is important and not always easy. That’s especially true for those writing in English, whose spelling is notoriously illogical. But, an artical ful of speling mistakes is going to maike you look careles or mabey even plane dumm. (Yikes!) See the two onMedia posts by Kate Hairsine on the importance of getting the right letters in the right order. Your credibility is on the line here.

Luckily modern technology helps us out here, the oh-so-useful spellcheck. Still, you’d be surprised about how many people don’t use it. I edit a magazine, so I know. Please use it. You might want to run a grammar check as well, if your program has one. There are some online options as well, as Kate points out.

But, a word of warning, don’t depend on these features because they don’t catch everything. Sometimes you need a dictionary on hand, online or analog, to make sure you’ve written discreet when you meant maintaining silence about something sensitive, and not discrete, which means separate, distinct.

Make every word count

Photo: flickr/Dan Patterson

Now, you’ve got all the spelling and grammar correct, what about your text? Does it move along briskly at an expeditious pace that will maintain your readers’ interest, or is it weighed down by a surfeit of adjectives and adverbs populating long, leaden, convoluted sentences bursting with ponderous, recondite, Latinate words? (Like this one.)

Space comes at a premium, even on websites. Readers’ attention is not what it used to be. Online, studies have shown people read even faster, often scanning. If your prose lies there inert, it’s likely a click of the mouse will take them to another piece whose words almost jump off the page. (Or, maybe a cat video.)

Go through your text and take a scalpel to it. Cut out all the adverbs and adjectives that aren’t absolutely necessary. Use short words that carry a punch when you can. Keep the rhythm changing and resist the temptation to add three subordinate clauses with five commas to your sentence.

We are not Proust. Cut the fat!

Do the math, check the names

Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. Shall I say it again? Accuracy. You’re responsible for it, not your copyeditor, even if you have one.

Photo: flickr/lilife2012

Most Journalists aren’t math whizzes. Maybe some are, but if we were great with numbers, wouldn’t we be working in finance or as actuaries? We’d certainly earn a lot more. This means we have to work extra hard to make sure our numbers are right. But it’s essential. Recheck your math; plug the numbers in the calculator again. Or, find someone who can figure out that percentage for you.

Double-check the names in your articles—your sources, companies, all that. Get titles right, check them. Maybe you’ve got someone’s business card, have another look at it. When you can, find another source—maybe a credible website—that has a firm’s name, especially these days when companies love unusual spellings (Tumblr, Yahoo!) or word spacing (PricewaterhouseCoopers).

You might want to consider this excellent accuracy checklist by Craig Silverman of The Poynter Institute’s Regret the Error blog. It contains a list of things that journalists should be sure they got right. You could print one out for every story you do and then go down the list, checking off what you’ve done to ensure your story is as accurate as it can be.

Checklist. Craig Silverman. Regret the error

Divide and conquer

Some people still have a hard time catching everything in one read-through. And in fact, it’s a lot to ask. One strategy is to read through a piece at least three times, taking a different approach each time.

On the first read, concentrate on the story’s structure and make sure it’s clear and easy to understand. A second read should look at spelling. During a third go-through, you should be on the lookout for any grammar errors that crept in. Do your subjects and verbs agree?

Dividing the focus like this can improve your chances of catching errors, and keep those headaches at bay.

Written by Kyle James, edited by Kate Hairsine

As an editor, I am surprised at how often reporters send me articles that they obviously haven’t run through a spell checker beforehand. And it’s usually journalists who work in a language other than English who fail to spell check – even though they might need all the English spelling help they can get.

With so many free tools and dictionaries available online, there is really no excuse. A reporter’s job is all about getting the facts correct. And if you send off an article, script or even an email full of spelling mistakes to your editor, how can they trust you to get the other facts right?

onMedia offers some tips on how to change the spell checker to different languages in documents and emails and which online spell-checkers are the most reliable.

Here’s a quick list of resources.

Free online spell checkers
There are many online spell checkers, but unfortunately not all of them are that good. Many of them only allow you to paste in a certain number of characters, which is really annoying. And others flag relatively new words such as ‘online’ and ‘blog’ as errors. This isn’t particularly useful if you write about a field where the vocabulary is regularly expanding.

My personal favorite is spellchecker.net as it has a wide layout and also highlights misspelled words, making it easier to use than many other online sites. You can select from hundreds of languages.

Spellboy.com is also easy to use and allows you to chose between UK and US English.

Using inbuilt spell checkers in word processing software

• OpenOffice (PC) and NeoOffice (Mac). This free office software has a long list of foreign-language dictionaries available online without charge. They are easy to install (I know, because this is what I use). Here are step-by-step instructions on how to do this for OpenOffice and NeoOffice.
• Microsoft Office. To spell-check in another language in Microsoft Office, your copy of the software must include a dictionary file of the desired language. You can see here what languages come with your version, and how to install new languages and change language setting here.
• Mac. See here for how to add dictionaries and change language settings.

Spell checking emails

• Gmail. Gmail does come with an inbuilt spell checker but it will only check in the language you’ve selected to display your email account in, making it difficult to swap backwards and forwards between different languages. For example, if your account is set up in Arabic, it will only spell check Arabic and if you want to quickly check an email in English, you have to completely change all the settings. In this case, it’s easier just to copy and paste your email text into an online spellchecker.
• Yahoo Mail. It’s easy to change between various languages – here’s how.
• Mozilla Thunderbird. You can add as many dictionaries as you like so you can easily spell check different languages. Find out more here. You can also set Thunderbird to automatically run the spell check before you send an email, which can save you from embarrassing spelling mistakes.

What to do when the spellchecker can’t help

I am Australian and write for both American and English media outlets – so at times I get confused about how I should spell a word for a particular client. Other times, the word is relatively new and I’m just not sure what’s more common – is ‘spell-checker’, ‘spellchecker’ or ‘spell checker’ correct, for example?

In these cases, I look up the expression in the Merriam Webster dictionary. I also paste the term into the New York Times newspaper site and see how they write the word. For English spelling, I type it into the Guardian.

Check and check again!

Be aware though, that a spell checker still won’t pick up the difference between ‘I’ve just read you’re email’ and ‘I’ve just read your email’ or ‘it’s warm today’ and ‘its warm today’ so it’s important to read everything one last time before you send it off.

Not only will you look more professional and trustworthy, your editor will love you!

Also take a look at these onMedia links

Journalists need to get better at spelling names

Tips to ensure effective and clear online writing

Written by Kate Hairsine

This is surprising not only because digital audio editing is such a useful skill, but also because basic editing is pretty easy to learn. This goes for journalists who don’t always work in radio too.

So for the workshops I’ve developed this step-by-step guide to basic audio editing. The concept should work for whatever editing program you have access to. The exact commands may change from program to program.

Although this guide is meant for beginners, experienced audio editors might want to take a look too. I developed this way of working to make sure your audio files are well organized and you always keep a backup copy of the original sound.

So let’s imagine we have a ten minute interview on our audio recorder and we want to edit it down to four minutes.

• Connect your audio recorder to your computer.
• Create a folder on your computer. Name the folder so you will remember what it is – for example “Fuel protest 17 Sept 13”.
• In that folder create two folders – “Raw audio” and “Edited audio”.

Once you have created the folders on your computer it will look something like this

• Copy the sound file from the audio recorder into the folder “Raw audio”.
• Disconnect your audio recorder. (This step is important. Now if anything goes wrong, you still have an untouched copy of the original file you can go back to.)
• Open the sound file in your audio editor.
• Select and delete the parts of the audio you don’t want. (This is the easiest way to edit. Most editors work the same way – you select the audio you want to delete using the mouse and then press the delete key.)
  

  Highlight the audio you don’t want and delete it. This is what it looks like in the program Audacity

• Keep deleting until you are happy with the interview. (Don’t try to edit out every single breath, “ummm” and “ahhhh” or do very fine edits. You should only edit when there is plenty of space between words. The final product should sound natural. Use the “Zoom In” function to help you. The rule is – If you can hear in the final audio that the interview has been edited, it’s a bad edit.)
• Now use the “Save as…” command to save the edited audio.
• Save the audio in the “Edited audio” folder with a name that describes it. For example “Fuel protest 170912 old man interview edited.”
• That’s it. Pretty simple, huh?

Now, of course, each audio editing program is different and you will need to get to know a program before you feel confident. The idea here, however, is to give you a guide so you get up the courage to play around a bit. So have fun! And let us know how you do.

Author: Martin Vogl

Along with asking how they work with photographers, we wanted know more about digital photo editing and the line between aesthetics and truth in photojournalism. How far do you edit a photograph without altering its context or meaning?

It’s a debate that also surrounded Paul Hansen’s winning photograph in this year’s World Press Photo award.

Paul Hansen, Dagens Nyheter: World Press Photo of the Year, Spot News

But given that photography is increasingly delivered and consumed online, how can more information be offered to a publication’s audience to not only enhance understanding of the image, but perhaps see an original and edited image – in the one file?

Fred Ritchin is a Professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University, and was picture editor of The New York Times Magazine from 1978-82.

He has long called for a broader standard to be developed: “whereby each of the four corners of a photograph might contain information placed there by the photographer which again would be made apparent to an interested reader who rolls over each corner”.

In a recent post on The Daily Beast Drama, Manipulation and Truth: Keeping Photojournalism Useful Ritchin explained his idea:

“The bottom right corner would contain the credit, copyright and/or Creative Commons information, a caption, and information as to whether the image had been manipulated. The bottom left corner would provide a larger context for the making of the image, its back story, recounted by the photographer, the subject, an eyewitness, or whoever else might be appropriate. The upper left corner would provide more still or video imagery to give a larger sense of what was going before or after the primary photograph was made. And the upper right corner would link to other websites (perhaps including the photographer’s own) that would help to provide further pertinent details and information.”

Ritchin has published a new book Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen which we plan to review for you shortly, and we’ll also take a look at ways of applying his idea in a forthcoming post on Thinglink in our Tools and Apps for Journalists series.

Author: Guy Degen

(Our thanks to World Press Photo for the use of Paul Hansen’s photograph)

(Before) Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR for TIME Magazine

Which do you prefer? The original image of a white balaclava-clad rebel in Libya carrying a rocket propelled grenade, or the more dramatic looking battlefield with increased contrast that brings out richer greys and red hues in the clouds, smoke and earth?

(After) Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR for TIME Magazine

The spectrum of digital tools available to photographers to edit images is vast – from professional software such as Photoshop or Aperture right through to consumer tools such as iPhoto or PicMonkey, not to mention hundreds of mobile photography applications.

If you’re of a certain vintage, then you might be a bit nostalgic about the days of film, the whiff of fixer and the time spent honing your skills in a dark room. Today adjusting the fundamental elements of a digital photograph, its DNA if you like, such as exposure/brightness, colour/saturation, whites/blacks, contrast/shadows and much, much more, are as easy as moving a virtual “slider” with a mouse.

But having a palette of digital tools does not mean editing a photo is a piece of cake. Far from it. In fact for photographers and newsroom photo-editors it opens up a raft of ethical questions.

(Before) Francesco Zizola/NOOR

How much can you digitally adjust an image to enhance its visual impact? What if the photograph is over or under exposed or the white balance is wrong – how far do you correct the image to make it look aesthetically pleasing, but without altering its context or meaning?

(After) Francesco Zizola/NOOR

In 2009, judges of Denmark’s Photo of the Year disqualified this image of Klavs Bo Christensen arguing he had gone too far in editing his image in Photoshop.

These were just some of the issues DW Akademie put to Claudio Palmisano, one of the founders of 10b Photography Laboratory in Rome.

Palmisano and his colleagues work closely with leading photo-journalists such as Yuri Kozyrev, Francesco Zizolo and Paolo Pellegrin. And while their name might not always appear in the byline alongside a photographer, the digital editing expertise of 10b has been an essential part of award winning photographs.

10b very much see themselves as a “digital darkroom” and when it comes to the ethical debate of using modern software in photojournalism, they state:

‘We believe that talking of “manipulation” is correct only when actual pixels are “moved”, therefore when the minimum unit of a digital image is at least either replaced or cloned.’

Read more in our interview with 10b Photography’s Claudio Palmisano.

How do you describe your role in the editing process of an image?

10b Photography laboratory is a ‘digital darkroom’ in the broadest sense. This means that we adapt the workflow of the traditional darkroom to digital images. Traditional tools like chemicals, enlarger and filters are replaced by Photoshop, just as much as the old negative film is now replaced by RAW files. We work together with the photographer to bring the image, and the whole story, as close as possible to the photographer’s vision. A dialogue between the photographer’s own vision and our visual culture is fundamental to achieving the desired result. I don’t think of our work in terms of ‘retouching’, but rather as ‘enhancing’ the inherent potential of the shot by containing its limits and strengthening its qualities.

When you open up a digital photo file to start work, how do you first approach an image for editing?

When dealing with images of photographers with whom I have a long and established work relationship, at first I usually process the files using a ‘Droplet’, a complex script of automated actions in Photoshop, which is tailor made for every photographer and each story. For example, in the case of the Arab Spring series by Yuri Kozyrev, I used the same Photoshop Droplet. Using Droplets enables us to quickly and efficiently calibrate contrast, saturation, textures and hues of a batch of images. After applying a general ‘coating’, we proceed to edit each photo one by one, detecting and enhancing volumes, details and symbols.

(Before) Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR for TIME Magazine

(After) Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR for TIME Magazine

How do you determine what is too much digital editing of a photograph, where the reality, meaning or truth of an image might be distorted? 

The limit lies entirely within the choices made by the photographer when shooting, the content of the image and its usage. Many theories have attempted to define the concept of ‘overphotoshopping’. Some theories are conservative, or purely reactionary points of view on digital editing, others are indifferent or experimental ideas. With that regard, in the field of documentary photography, my opinion takes into account that colour perception is a relative phenomenon, and therefore allows a fairly wide range of possibilities. Nevertheless, I consider beyond the limit of what is acceptable any change that disrupts the rapports among colours (i.e. altering only one colour) or alters the context of the image (cloning, removing or adding pixels).

How much do you think digital editing technology is having an impact on a photographer’s style? 

I think that the impact of the technology of digital editing tools on a photographer’s style is huge. But the same has always been true for all photographers as their technological tools were upgraded and new inventions were introduced in the field of photography. From the daguerreotype, to the positive/negative process, the glass plate negative, the gelatine emulsion, the celluloid film base, the 35mm film, the introduction of colour photography, and onwards up to digital cameras of the 2nd and 3rd generation, and the use of image enhancing software. Every technological innovation revolutionised the approach of photographers and it will happen again in the future with any major innovation.

When a photographer is planning to work with you, do you ask them to set their camera in particular way to produce RAW or JPG files that will give you the most options for editing? 

I always recommend shooting RAW, so any further suggestion becomes superfluous. If a photographer were compelled to send JPG (i.e. Internet connection problems), it would be better that he/she processed the RAW file according to my instructions and then sent me the ensuing JPG. If you have to post-process the JPG created by your digital camera, it is important to select a wide colour profile (Adobe 98) and to categorically deselect any other pre-setting.

Interview: Guy Degen

(Images published in this post with the kind permission of the photographers and 10b Photography)