This week was a slow one, comparatively. Turned in two blog posts-- one on winter riding and one on for the MSU Pocket Guide blog on study snacks to avoid gaining weight in the winter. They both came out rather quickly and easily, but necessitated much editing.
I had a good lesson this week-- Mike and I went over the study snacks blog, and got into a minor dispute over the nature of the type of food I chose: mostly healthy, and unintentionally meat-free items. I wholeheartedly disagreed with his critique, but it took me a while to realize that wasn't the point-- and the change was then made, and the article published. Respect the editor, respect your boss, they have the final say.
After all of this, I had a few additional changes to make before publishing the blog on a Friday night, so I made them and went home, forgetting about it. Saturday morning, while glancing through the online version, I realized that the edit session with Mike hadn't been saved, and the published version reflected the original draft of the article... and all it's errors. I had to go back through it quickly and try to remember everything Mike had corrected. In a way, it felt like a blessing in disguise because it tested my ability to retain what Mike had taught me and spot those small errors in the text again. He hasn't mentioned anything to me, so I think I must have caught (nearly) all of them.
Copy-edits for spring are done, and now we wait for the end of the week to proofread and finalize the layout. Assignments for Cast will soon be allocated, and then we will repeat the process. This week one of the other editorial interns quit, which I have mixed opinions about. It means less competition, but now more work for me.
Today I'm bogged down with administrative tasks-- sorting through excel spread sheets, de-duping, updating, organizing, etc. It makes my head hurt, and is completely uninteresting, as well as rather hard to understand and make decisions about because of the nature of the material. It's frustrating and slow work, but it's sort of nice to have a break from the editing and writing... for a little while.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Sunday, February 15, 2015
O/B: Week Six
Stressful week. Copy edits, re-writes, more deadlines.
The week was a slow one for all those not in the editorial department. We're getting closer and closer to our production dates, so articles are reaching the final stages of their drafting. Once an article has been written, it becomes a draft which is then fact-checked (by an intern), and goes through it's first round of copy-editing. A second round is done by an out-of-house editor who checks for content consistency, and then the drafts are sent to the managing editor to be copy-edited again, laid-out in the appropriate category, and for any changes to be made. These drafts are then approved by Mike, who does the final round of editing and sends the finished article to the writer for consent. This process ends this coming week, so the art editors can have the week to work on creative layout and photography. Then, next week, we will begin proofreads of the mock-up, and the issue will be go through the final stages of editing before print.
This week I did some editing, then some writing. I've been assigned two more blog posts, and had to work on the Outlook, a more creative photo-accompanied piece for the beginning of the mag., as well as some rewrites for the articles I already turned in.
Things are still going well overall, and every day I seem to learn something more about the language that I didn't know (like "cleanup" is one word when used as a noun!). I feel stressed about the amount of work I know I have coming up (Mike assigns to-do lists so we are always responsible for deadlines, which is stressful), on top of school, but I am motivated by knowing this is my last semester and that this work will be paying off in the long run.
More to come.
The week was a slow one for all those not in the editorial department. We're getting closer and closer to our production dates, so articles are reaching the final stages of their drafting. Once an article has been written, it becomes a draft which is then fact-checked (by an intern), and goes through it's first round of copy-editing. A second round is done by an out-of-house editor who checks for content consistency, and then the drafts are sent to the managing editor to be copy-edited again, laid-out in the appropriate category, and for any changes to be made. These drafts are then approved by Mike, who does the final round of editing and sends the finished article to the writer for consent. This process ends this coming week, so the art editors can have the week to work on creative layout and photography. Then, next week, we will begin proofreads of the mock-up, and the issue will be go through the final stages of editing before print.
This week I did some editing, then some writing. I've been assigned two more blog posts, and had to work on the Outlook, a more creative photo-accompanied piece for the beginning of the mag., as well as some rewrites for the articles I already turned in.
Things are still going well overall, and every day I seem to learn something more about the language that I didn't know (like "cleanup" is one word when used as a noun!). I feel stressed about the amount of work I know I have coming up (Mike assigns to-do lists so we are always responsible for deadlines, which is stressful), on top of school, but I am motivated by knowing this is my last semester and that this work will be paying off in the long run.
More to come.
Monday, February 9, 2015
O/B: Week Five
This week at Outside Bozeman was one focused on reflection.
My tasks have been short and focused, as I'm copy-editing and fact checking the 60+ articles we've received for the spring issue. I've found I really enjoy the process-- it fits in well with my natural inclination for organization-- but it makes me painfully aware of how many disorganized writers there are. How on earth do you not realize that a link like this --> (http:\\www.nocommonsense.com/outside-bozeman-cannot-prin?t-this\345869799199)
CAN NEVER be printed in an issue? It's a big pet peeve of mine, having to fix all of the errors because the writer was too lazy.
Which brings me to formatting. On what planet is it okay to write in Comic Sans? What magazine have you written for previously where you didn't include a by-line, or word count? Why would you put three spaces when beginning a new sentence? Or type in grey font? The benefit of doing all this work and experiencing these errors (and how much they annoy me) means that the next time I go to have something published or to send a query to a magazine, I can make sure I avoid these same problems and KEEP CONSISTENT... because I know how valuable time is for an editor.
Each day of editing-- each article, really-- teaches me something new, and my style guide is now covered in ink with amendments I find necessary to make as I wade through the waters of compound adjective hyphenation, dangling modifiers, and serial commas. I know so much more already than when I began, but I still find myself questioning the most basic of things-- like capitalization of certain proper nouns, like the Headwaters, or Missouri River. I wonder if I'll be wondering about this stuff for the rest of my life...
Otherwise things are moving along, as we come closer and closer to our production deadline. I had another small article (a sidebar, actually) added to my piece, and got some positive feedback from the editors! Though tomorrow is another day...
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
O/B: Week Four
It's been about a month now since I began with Outside Bozeman, and we just keep on keeping on.
This Monday was my first production deadline with the editors-- which means all my articles had to be ready to hit the press: researched and written, fact-checked, and copy-edited. For the most part, I feel like the seven pieces I was in charge of have come out well, though I do feel like they don't do much. I can't wait for a chance to write what needs to be written, but this whole experience is about paying my dues so I can learn how to climb to the top.
That being said, I learned some valuable lessons via the process of writing these pieces. First, I held an interview with the Montana Raptor Conservation Center, a local non-profit, and was surprised how very different it went than I had been anticipating. In my mind and my experiences, interviews always consisted of a relatively formal process where questions are laid out (though certainly flexible, as good interviewers should move where the speaker takes them) and there is a certain level of expectation from both parties on the Q/A format. But when I walked in to the Center and met Jason and Becky-- the only two paid employees at the Center-- I quickly realized I needed to ditch my spiral notebook and just listen. Thank god I had picked up a recorder the evening before because being able to go back and transcribe the conversation was the single most helpful tool for the completion of the piece.
Becky took me from cage to cage and introduced me to each of the recovering birds. It was easy to see the clear respect and awe she had for the wildness of the raptors, and from the way she spoke about them I sensed how rewarding being able to release these birds again must be for her. I met owls of all sizes and vultures, golden and bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, and several smaller raptors that I only know by the names Nekka and Watson, the friendly buggers-- Nekka liked to roost on my head as Becky showed me around.
I could talk about the experience there for longer than I care to here, but I found it really interesting that what I had thought I would walk away with in terms of content was so far from what I found most interesting. I was so captivated by the raptors and what these two incredible individuals are doing that I wanted to focus on giving them something in turn for what the birds gave me while I was around them. I wrote the piece much more heavily geared toward advocacy, making clear that the Center is a 501c3 and that they offer some really unique opportunities to the community in terms of their education courses. None of my work has been reviewed yet by the editors, so I don't know if I hit the nail on the head or nailed myself in the head quite yet... but I have faith in the quality of my work-- which counts for something, right?
I find that the office dynamic is rather engaging at Outside Bozeman. There are several other interns, two other editorial who I see and work with frequently. For the most part we are separate in terms of our work, but there are smaller mutual projects that we collaborate on. I find that I seem to be the most serious of the three of us, which has proven beneficial since I also seem to have the most responsibility. It's nice to have partners to ask the stupid questions, or who understand when you just need to sigh and say "fuck" every three minutes because you have so much to do that you can't keep straight in your head what to work on next. There's also an aire of competition between us, which seems to help keep me motivated and gives me a place to compare others' work and my own-- don't think this happens nearly enough in a classroom setting.
Again, I am staying hopeful and positive. There is another copy-edit deadline rolling in on Friday, meaning the rest of this week will be ten hour days working non-stop on the 60 submitted pieces for the spring issue. Vamos!
This Monday was my first production deadline with the editors-- which means all my articles had to be ready to hit the press: researched and written, fact-checked, and copy-edited. For the most part, I feel like the seven pieces I was in charge of have come out well, though I do feel like they don't do much. I can't wait for a chance to write what needs to be written, but this whole experience is about paying my dues so I can learn how to climb to the top.
That being said, I learned some valuable lessons via the process of writing these pieces. First, I held an interview with the Montana Raptor Conservation Center, a local non-profit, and was surprised how very different it went than I had been anticipating. In my mind and my experiences, interviews always consisted of a relatively formal process where questions are laid out (though certainly flexible, as good interviewers should move where the speaker takes them) and there is a certain level of expectation from both parties on the Q/A format. But when I walked in to the Center and met Jason and Becky-- the only two paid employees at the Center-- I quickly realized I needed to ditch my spiral notebook and just listen. Thank god I had picked up a recorder the evening before because being able to go back and transcribe the conversation was the single most helpful tool for the completion of the piece.
Becky took me from cage to cage and introduced me to each of the recovering birds. It was easy to see the clear respect and awe she had for the wildness of the raptors, and from the way she spoke about them I sensed how rewarding being able to release these birds again must be for her. I met owls of all sizes and vultures, golden and bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, and several smaller raptors that I only know by the names Nekka and Watson, the friendly buggers-- Nekka liked to roost on my head as Becky showed me around.
I could talk about the experience there for longer than I care to here, but I found it really interesting that what I had thought I would walk away with in terms of content was so far from what I found most interesting. I was so captivated by the raptors and what these two incredible individuals are doing that I wanted to focus on giving them something in turn for what the birds gave me while I was around them. I wrote the piece much more heavily geared toward advocacy, making clear that the Center is a 501c3 and that they offer some really unique opportunities to the community in terms of their education courses. None of my work has been reviewed yet by the editors, so I don't know if I hit the nail on the head or nailed myself in the head quite yet... but I have faith in the quality of my work-- which counts for something, right?
I find that the office dynamic is rather engaging at Outside Bozeman. There are several other interns, two other editorial who I see and work with frequently. For the most part we are separate in terms of our work, but there are smaller mutual projects that we collaborate on. I find that I seem to be the most serious of the three of us, which has proven beneficial since I also seem to have the most responsibility. It's nice to have partners to ask the stupid questions, or who understand when you just need to sigh and say "fuck" every three minutes because you have so much to do that you can't keep straight in your head what to work on next. There's also an aire of competition between us, which seems to help keep me motivated and gives me a place to compare others' work and my own-- don't think this happens nearly enough in a classroom setting.
Again, I am staying hopeful and positive. There is another copy-edit deadline rolling in on Friday, meaning the rest of this week will be ten hour days working non-stop on the 60 submitted pieces for the spring issue. Vamos!
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