My role and experience as editor - contributions

 

As part of the publication for the module I Have edited some of the group’s work, and given feedback on what they have done. Having taken up this role, I have changed grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and some choices of phrasing, without detracting from the original authors work and content.

I wanted to ensure that, although the pieces may read better, that they kept the original wording and context, and did not become my own work rather than someone else’s.

The pieces ranged from reviews, to advisory pieces, and articles for sport.

As part of the editing process, I have also been consulting with the main designers of the publication, in coming up with pagination, ideas, and layouts for the publication.

I also found and selected the images that will be used as part of the front cover for the publication. These can be found on Basecamp.

 

I drew up some of my own designs and came up with the running order in the publication so that we could arrange where features and certain design aspects and features would lay in the publication.

 

As part of the overall process, I have overseen the majority of decisions, and aspects that are pivotal to the publication becoming an actual designed and working publication rather than just a collection of articles and pinion pieces.

I have tried to advise where people may have needed stronger pieces of journalism, and aspects that could be worded differently to avoid offence and bias.

The hardest parts of being editorial in this particular instance, is that some of the pieces may not be edited fully by myself, and completely re worked.

As the piece is marked individually, I would not wish to change someone else’s work to the point of it becoming my own. Also, it is difficult to give constructive advice, when sometimes, people may only want to write opinionated pieces rather than take on a more investigative and strong journalism article or piece.

This is difficult to manage as the publication had to have a variety of aspects and features to it, without loosing its journalistic nature, and becoming something of an opinionated gossip paper.

The motivational aspects are difficult too, as some members of a group can become agitated at a lack of work being placed their way, but the high majority of the work produced in the publication was supposed to be pieces that each individual was interested in, rather than picking things that were not of interest to us.

I initially laid out a Writeboard and basecamp so that each person could individually choose aspects and areas of journalism that they would like to write on. Not one person used this in the first instance, as I first though of this for the purposes of the presentation to outline what we would each individually do, and it would have helped us track and identify what we have each done.

This was also something that I found myself doing in vein in the end, as people did not make use of what should have been a helpful tool and something that I had personally tried to help people with as part of getting the publication started.

Some members may have felt that as editing the pieces, and conducting much communications, that I am therefore responsible for telling each individual what they have to do and how they have to do it.

This is very frustrating, as I have no one person telling me to do particular aspects such as edit the work, or write particular pieces, I just use initiative, and I feel that this is something some members of the group have lacked during the process, which has ultimately led to it becoming increasingly difficult to manage and produce a creative and polished final publication to a high standard and deadline.