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Chapter 3

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Exercises

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Editing 2.0 Exercises: You have to act fast!

Module 3.1

Questions

  1. How much shorter, or briefer, can our content get? Twitter re-defined social media with a 140-character limit on tweets. Twitter’s Vine platform for video trades in 6-second videos. Facebook posts of 70 characters or less get the most likes. So how short is too short?
  2. A related question: To what extent should online editors pare down and trim back content simply to appease ever-shorter attention spans? In other words, how should brevity and conciseness be weighed against other values, such as complexity, texture, depth and nuance?

Activities

  1. Read through the findings from the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack data specific to tablets such as the iPad and Kindle (www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/visual-voice/191875/new-poynter-eyetrack-research-reveals-how-people-read-news-on-tablets/). What surprises you about these findings? Based on these findings, how should writing for these tablets differ from content for other media, in particular websites?
  2. Take a look at the top-viewed YouTube videos in the “News & Politics” category. After viewing a few of them, develop a short list of what qualities these videos share. Can you identify the reasons why they are the most viewed? What reasons might be broadly applicable to all video published on the web?

Quiz

Editor’s Bookshelf—Additional Reading Suggestions

Focus on skills and tools: The editor in the newsroom

Rogers, Tony. Working journalist: Chris Krewson, the new editor of Variety.com, talks about his job. About.com Guide.

Silverman, Craig. Study: Readers value extra editing, women especially. Poynter.org, April 17, 2012. Readers view well-edited articles as more professional, more valuable and of higher quality than articles that have been minimally edited, according to a study presented at the American Copy Editors Society conference in New Orleans.