Editors' Guide: Co-ordinator

Your job is to edit the editors' summaries and post them to the CMS.

Organize the editors to ensure all sections are covered. We need a digest that will have around 18 items in it, with as much Canadian news as we can get. Ideally ...

  • six Canada
  • six U.S.
  • six World

If you're waiting around for stories to arrive, help your editors by summarizing one or two stories.

The editors will email you their summaries. As you paste them into an Microsoft Word document, check for:

  • Duplication
  • Do we have the major stories of the day covered?
  • No more than two light/weird/bizarre stories?

Edit for:

  • Digest style -- eg. upper/lower case headlines, news in the first line
  • CP style -- eg. Canadian spellings and measurements for international stories, proper date and number formats, etc.
  • Length -- ensure the stories are short; 65-80 words maximum
  • Grammar
  • Factual accuracy -- if an element doesn't seem right (fact, spelling, etc.), check it on the web. 
  • Sense -- do these 75 words form a clear story?
  • Comprehensiveness -- do they answer the five Ws?

At 10:45:

  • Make a final call for stories
  • Tell Terra when all of the summaries are edited and ready for posting (about 11:00 a.m.). We'll read through them one more time.

Publish the Digest

Your second job is to transfer the completed Digest from its final Microsoft Word form to the CMS. This is a technical job, not an editorial job. It simply involves a lot of copying and pasting. Once we have edited the Microsoft Word file, you can take that file and put it into the CMS.

So, open the final text-file version of the Digest and sign in to the UNews CMS. Choose "Digest" from the "Publish" menu and we're ready to go.

The fastest way to transfer the content is to copy the entire Digest item and paste it into the "Summary" field. Then copy and paste individual elements into the other form fields:

  • Cut and paste the headline into the title field
  • Paste the URL into the "Source Story URL" field
  • Choose a section
  • Paste the News Source
  • If it's a Lead Item in the section, choose Yes for that

Click "Submit" for each. Repeat for the next item. Once you've done a couple, check one or two by choosing the Edit tab and change Filter by Section to "Digest." Click Search. Then Choose Live Look for one of the items you've edited. Continue with the rest. This should take you about 20 minutes.

When you're done, publlish them live to UNews by choosing the Edit tab and change Filter by Section to "Digest." Click Search. Click the box (at right) of the most recent item you edited, normally the first item in the list. Now hold your shift key down and click the earliest item in the list that you edited. You should now have all of today's edited items highlighted. Click "Edit Selected" at the bottom right. (Submit) Change the Entry Status for each to "Open" (Published). Click "Update." Check it on unews.ca

... tell Tim and you're done!