Working with an Editor

Brian Ward

Sandy Marsters

News-Writing 621

Oct. 24, 2011

Working with an editor

I have been working with Travis Harsin on my articles.

Working with an editor is different than I expected. I’ve never worked with an editor before, so the only image I had was Peter Parkers's boss in Spiderman; fast talking, order shouting and generally brusque and condensing. I’ve found that working with an editor is nothing like that. I’ve met with Travis in person a few times and we exchanged a lot of emails, and he has been extremely helpful.

Working with Travis has been more like working with a friend than with a boss. He still gives good feedback of my work and points out areas where I can improve but it’s much more informal and stress-free process than I had feared. He occasionally gives suggestions for ways I can improve upon my story ideas, and has given me some advice on how to do certain things like deal with sources and writing things on time. For the most part however, he leaves me be to find and work on my own stories, which was the biggest surprise for me. I had feared that he would be constantly looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do, but I’m still pretty much free to follow my own leads, except now I have someone who periodically tells me if I’m writing anything decent or not.

The first article of mine that he edited was on the planned third floor renovations at Dimond Library. He pointed out things missing from the article and how I could improve upon them. He point out that there wasn’t much to connect my target audience, UNH students, to the article. There wasn’t anything in the article to make the reader care that the library was adding more tables and installing computers, so the article lost its impact.

He also suggested trying to talk to people with different views on the topic. In my article, both my student interviewees expressed the basically the same views on the renovations. One interviewee didn’t feel like the renovations would affect her at all, and the other thought the renovations were going to waste money and cause problems. Travis pointed out that my article would have been more balanced if I had found another person to interview who had a different view on the topic. In hindsight I can agree, with just the two interviewees I had, the article took a more negative tone when I was trying to be impartial.

He pointed out to me was that in a few cases I didn’t follow up on a few things in the article, or briefly mentioned them without giving any details. In my article I mentioned that the library conducted focus groups and studies to find out what students would want regarding renovations. I didn’t explain what studies were conducted or what their findings were, I just mentioned they happened and didn’t expand upon them.

I’ve taken Travis’s advice into consideration when working on my other articles, and I feel that there’s been a notable improvement in the quality of my work. I’ve worked more on adding more detail and information into my articles and making the article draw in and connect with my readers. So far, I found the journalist-editor system has been very beneficial to me.