A crucial part of my job is editing.
I’m the editor, a role in newspapers I’ve held for more than 40 years.
My early years in the business were devoted to reporting and photography.
Later, as my duties expanded, I added newspaper layout and editing to my skillset.
I still incorporate all of the above in publishing the Sentinel.
And, it’s not doing the whole business by rote. Every issue has its challenges.
Jessica and I are both reporters and photographers.
Both skills were honed by a long line of editors, English teachers and journalism professors, as well as photographers at several papers over decades for me.
Today, as I write or edit something, I’ll remember a long-distant editor going over a story I’d written or a photographer explaining how to frame a photograph or, better, to take in everything around me in composing a picture.
I worked as a police reporter/church editor at a North Texas daily a half-century ago.
The combination duties in that title were fraught with peril in many directions if something went wrong in what I wrote.
I hated that job, but the editors I had and the photographers I worked with instilled a lot of good lessons I’ve held close since then.
I’m grateful to all of those people and I hope I’ve imparted good advice to those who worked with me.
Perhaps no area of newspaper journalism has changed more than the layout of a paper, not to mention the size of the paper itself.
When I began, lots of papers were still printed by the ancient method of hot type and the stories on a front page and inside were usually set on eight columns with an incredibly small 8-point copy.
Most papers are 11 or 12 point size today.
In the 1970s, more dailies went to a modular style of layout that packaged stories and photographs, whenever possible, producing a cleaner look.
Today’s front pages still use that system, albeit smaller in size and more evolved.
I’d say the Sentinel still follows the older modular look, by placing more stories on the front page.
When I edit the stories – and that includes all locally written stories – I try to break paragraphs up to provide an easier to read story with more space.
Stories with few indentions are more difficult to read. Indeed, I think they discourage readers.
It’s what’s inside those stories that counts, and I want the reader to dive in each one of them.
