Role

Copy Editor, 3 people in the team

• Catch errors before and after published
• Make sure stories are readable, understandable and logical, both to the general public and people with sophisticated knowledge in business

Goal

• Maintain CNBC’s credibility by minimizing the number of mistakes

Experience

• Have been using Toolbelt since its inception
• Worked with AP for 4 and a half years
• Helped edit the AP style book, so very intimate with AP style

Day-to-Day Work

• Starts with the 3~5 Enterprise stories that are written the day before
  • To be released sometime during the day
  • If the copy editors don’t get to these, the stories get published the next day
• Do corrections and clarifications on stories already published by first-line editors
• Edits Breaking News as quick as possible
  • Changes timestamps when additional edits are made after publication, or else it remains to be the first published time
• Edits partner stories’ abstracts and headlines
  • Doesn’t edit the content/body
• Sometimes double-checks the sensitive stories edited by international teams
  • e.g. Political story edited by Singapore team
• Ranks the stories in Politics page and U.S. News page
• Schedules the stories to be published
  • Scroll Notes: Thursdays
  • Releases during the weekend & Monday
• Sends out weekly news on style, “The Style Stickler”
• Adds hyphenation rules to CNBC Style Guide for others to reference

Time

• Takes 15 minutes on average to edit a story
  • Longer story takes longer, e.g. story of a transcript – need to read through the transcript, check names
• 25~30 stories per day

Shifts

• Time
  • 6:30 AM ~ 2:30 PM: himself
  • 10:00 AM ~ 6:00 PM
  • 11:00 AM ~ 7:00 PM
• Always at least one person during the prime time
• There’s a good portion of the day where all three of them are there during the day

Communication

• Writers & Editors
  • To expedite the copy editing on certain stories
  • In-person if there are easy fixes on breaking news

Often-used Content Type and Features in Toolbelt

Content Type

• News Story
• Partner Story

Pain Points

• Even with the spellchecker, writers and the copy editors miss the typos
• Not all writers and even the copy editors themselves know how to hyphenate, which affects credibility of the news
  • e.g. Beat writers might not know how to hyphenate Wal-Mart Store vs. Walmart
• After saving, there are confirmation messages that need to be manually closed
• Save and Publish buttons were too close and often made mistake of publishing instead of saving
  • The issue got better after Toolbelt changed them to be farther apart
• When hyperlinking, have to manually click the checkbox to open in the new tab every single time
• Others don’t know to paste in the plain text to Toolbelt and create spacing problems, and he tells them that they need to use plain text
• Needs larger fonts, so zooms in in the browser. But Toolbelt doesn’t show some of the fields in the zoomed state.
• Have to watch the 30-second ad of the videos when proofing the preview

Wants

• Anything that reduces the number of things you have to change
• When you reopen the story in the CMS, it goes to the previously viewed spot in story
• Interesting to have AP style checker
• When hyperlinking, automatically select the option to open in the new tab
• If the main Franchise is selected, it should automatically go in as a Primary Asset
• Skip and not watch the ad for in-house videos

Tools & Software

Communication

• Google Doc
  • Keeps track of stories with different categories
  • Categories to look at:
    • For immediate publication
    • Stories for the future
    • Hot seat edit: mostly partner stories
    • Pubbed: Move the stories that are edited and published
• Email

Style Guide

• Online AP stylebook
  • Lets you search words – look up hyphenation
• CNBC Style Guide
  • Lists out CNBC’s own exception
  • He adds the hyphenation rules

Work Behaviors & Rules

• Google the proper names to catch typos and information is correct
  • e.g. Executive of the company resigned overnight, so got fixed to former executive
• In Google Doc, primary editors add their name in lowercase after their edits, and copy editors in all uppercase to keep track of the story’s status and know who edited it
• If a story is developing, you don’t need to have a full story right away and add more after publishing
  • Modify the timestamp after making changes to the article
• Don’t disturb the flow of writers if the story is constantly updating
  • Read the article online, and ignore minor problems
  • Walk up to the writer and tells the thing to be fix, if it’s an easy fix
• Be cordial to the writers, especially younger, newer writers
• Knows the character limits of each Headline and Description field
  • Link Headline: 80
  • Shorter Headline: 39
  • Shortest Headline: 30
  • Description: 150
  • Shorter Description: 150
  • Shortest Description: 120
• Tries to make description and headlines in present tense to save space and to make it immediate-sounding
• Keep things concise as possible

Miscellaneous

• Likes current workflow, since there are constant amount of work
• Doesn’t like work building up, so brings lunch to his desk
• Some editors do offline editing, but he does all the editing in Toolbelt
• Workbench was a horrible experience – unstable, lock up, lose copy
• Refer to online AP style guide when in doubt
• Rarely lost a copy even without saving multiple times throughout the edit
• There used to be a feature called Tweet This, and it died out
  • A couple words would be hyperlinked to lead the users to tweet about the article
  • It was time consuming
• Likes the search functionality in Primary Asset section
  • Only searches over Franchises, so takes less time than selecting the filter on universal search
  • Unlike the universal search, this also accepts partial keywords and offer auto-completion
• Likes the preview function
  • Added about a year ago
  • It was scary to publish before