Tag Archives: subediting

Yahoo releases Style Guide for writing and editing

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Yahoo has released a style guide for writing, editing and creating content in the ‘digital world’. Priced at £13.12 on Amazon.co.uk (currently on pre-order only), it promises to be the ‘Ultimate Sourcebook’.

Here’s the blurb:

Is it Web site, website, or web site? What’s the best on-screen placement for a top story? How can I better know my site’s audience? The rapid growth of the Web has meant having to rely on style guides that are intended for print publishing, such as The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White’s, The Elements of Style, or The Associated Press Stylebook, but these excellent guides do not address writing for the Internet.

The Yahoo! Style Guide does. Writers and programmers at Yahoo!, faced with a lack of industry guidance fifteen years ago, began cobbling together a set of guidelines for Web writing.

The seeds of The Yahoo! Style Guide were planted with their first in-house reference guide, and Yahoo! content creators have built and added to the guide ever since, making it the go-to manual inside Yahoo!. Polished and expanded for its public debut, this resource will cover the basics of grammar and punctuation as well as Web-specific ways to perfect a site, such as:

• Identifying the audience and making the site accessible to everyone
• Constructing clear and compelling copy
• Developing a site’s unique voice
• Streamlining text for mobile devices
• Optimizing Web pages to increase the chances of appearing in search results
• Streamlining text so that people can read your pages at Internet speed.

The Yahoo! Style Guide will help anyone who writes, edits, or designs for the Internet accomplish their work with clarity and precision.

Via FishbowlNY

Subbing debate continues on Radio4’s Media Show with Greenslade and Cathcart

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If you missed it yesterday, this week’s Media Show presented by Ed Stourton is worth listening to. In light of the recent bush fires in Australia, Stourton asks his guests (Reuters’ Chris Cramer and Channel 4’s Lindsey Hilsum) about generational changes in journalism when reporting in emotional or distressing situations. Then, a look at the fate of Teletext. But then to a debate that’s been dominating newspaperland over the last week following Roy Greenslade’s declaration that subs – as we know them – are becoming redundant.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hklvr/The_Media_Show_18_02_2009

Brian Cathcart and Roy Greenslade (on the line from Brighton) talk to Stourton.

A quick summary:

BC:

  • “There is this army of people who are out there serving the industry of journalism, who police this and in quite a private and quiet way (…) [They] check the grammar and spelling, check some of the facts (…) check the sort of general thrust of the story, that it all makes sense (…) cut it to length and put a headline on top.”
  • “I don’t think they [subs] should be at the front of the queue for the chop.”

RG:

  • Makes it clear that his comments apply to regional/local and broadsheet or serious newspapers, rather than tabloids. Subs are ‘key workers when it comes to tabloid newspapers.’
  • Subbing outsourcing is already happening, with sub-editors working cross-titles at many papers.
  • “The change I’m expecting next is that subs will be eliminated or re-purposed (…) what we need are writers, reporters who can produce copy which is already accurate and obeys the law, and so on…”
  • Radio and TV presenters are expected to produce material speedily and accurately; “why is it that we don’t expect NP journalists to do the same thing?”

Then to the Midlands to meet the Birmingham Post editor, Marc Reeves (@marcreeves) and one of the media production journalists who works across several of the group’s titles.

MR:

  • The paper is ‘saying to people we need you to be used to this new way of working’.
  • The titles will ‘always need people to look after the finessing of the output (…) certainly the traditional role of the subeditor will be redefined.’