Editing for Today's Newsroom provides training, support and advice for prospective news editors. Through history, analyses, and anecdotes, this book offers a solid grounding to prepare potential editors for the full range of their responsibilities in today's newsrooms: developing ideas; evaluating and editing copy; working with writers; determining what is news; understanding presentation and design; directing news coverage; managing people; making decisions under pressure; and coping with a variety of ethical, legal, and professional considerations, all while operating in today’s multimedia, multiplatform news arena. Author Carl Sessions Stepp focuses on editors as newsroom decision makers and quality controllers; accordingly, the book features strategies and techniques for coping with a broad spectrum of editing duties. Covering basic and advanced copyediting skills, it also provides intellectual context to the editor's role, critically examining the history of editing and the changing job of the contemporary editor.

The last decade has seen significant shifts in the roles of editors in the newsroom. Pagination has moved page composition from the backshop into the newsroom, placing additional responsibilities on copy and design editors. Newsrooms have become more collaborative, with emphasis on cooperation between various departments, and between copy editors and assigning editors. The biggest change is the growth of the Internet as a medium for news delivery. Most newspapers have accompanying Web sites, where breaking news can be posted for audiences long before the next print edition goes to press. In a sense, it’s a return to the days when newspapers published multiple editions throughout the day—only now, it’s done online. In Modern News Editing, authors Ludwig and Gilmore have creatively reworked Gilmore’s classic textbook to fully integrate editing for online publication and editing for print. Whether the medium is a print newspaper or an online news site, the function of editors remains the same: to guide a news story from its inception to its publication. The fundamentals are still necessary. Is it news? How should it be approached? How should it be presented? Does the grammar pass muster? Is style consistently followed? Do headlines and photo captions capture reader interests? What are the needs and desires of the audience? Have the responsibilities of the news media to promote a free and self-governing society been met? The Modern News Editing CD-ROM is packed with exercises to practice the concepts taught. Microsoft Word files feature editable sentences and stories containing problems with spelling, grammar, style, and incorrect facts. Also included are photographs in JPEG format for import into photo editing and/or page layout programs, to practice cropping and sizing, and for use in page design. Sample pages and page templates in Quark Xpress, Adobe InDesign, and Adobe PageMaker are presented for use in page design exercises. Modern News Editing is the textbook of choice to train future editors, whether they work for a print newsroom or an online publication.

The work of «editing» is by and large something that happens behind the scenes, noticed only when it is done badly, or not done at all. There is not much information about what editors do. The result is that editing is not often talked about in its own right - not even by the people who do it. This collection of interviews attempts to fill some of the gaps. The author, a former editor herself, interviews practitioners at the top of their game - from newspapers, magazines, broadcast news, book publishing, scholarly editing, academic publishing and digital curation. The interviewees think out loud about creativity and human judgment; what they have in common and what makes them different; how editing skills and culture can be shared; why editing continues to fascinate; and why any of this might matter.

Requirements for professional media editing have undergone enormous technological change. Editors still edit copy. But today they do much more. Mass media editors must demonstrate skills from computerized pagination to social media monitoring, from image manipulation to Search Engine Optimization. The need for editing skills is reaching far beyond traditional journalism and into all areas of mass media, from newspapers to strategic communication. Public relations practitioners are expected to edit. Even advertising creative professionals must edit. And journalists taking on new roles as social media editors need to understand editing at the speed of digital media. This textbook aims to prepare university-level students for these expanded editing roles in an age of convergence. Thirteen authors representing many years of collective media experience examine both traditional editing roles and new editing needs. While many mass media students will not become professional editors, this textbook assumes nearly all will need competent editing knowledge to produce products of professional quality. Editing, the authors believe, remains a bedrock skill for all students who hope to be successful in the mass media. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.