ACES Philadelphia

Paula Devlin says she’s learned to stop worrying about the Web and embrace it instead.
After more than 25 years in a variety of roles on the copy desk, Devlin was named an online news editor at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.
Here’s what it has taught her:

It’s fun to be back in the breaking news business, [...]

Reading on the Web is different than print so writing needs to be different too.
Studies have shown 79 percent of Web readers scan pages instead of reading them, Yahoo’s Trystan Bass told editors.
She offered five tips for writing or editing on the Web.

Frontload information. Put keywords at the beginning of sentences.
Use brief keyword-loaded headings throughout [...]

It was great to be in a room this morning with three language greats —  Merrill Perlman, Bill Walsh and Ben Zimmer.
You can follow all three on Twitter to see what they’re saying about language issues:  just search for @meperl, Bill’s @TheSlot and @bgzimmer.
And it’s good to know that the experts on language and grammar [...]

Merrill Perlman offered editors tips on usage and language at her popular “Only if only I knew only” session.
Only may be a little word, but where you put it means a lot, Perlman said.
Put only closest to the word or phrase it’s modifying.
As Perlman pointed out, “Only I hit him in the eye” has an [...]

AP Stylebook editors David Minthorn and Darrell Christian took questions from a packed room at an afternoon session of the ACES conference today. But before they did, they addressed two style issues that had people tweeting like crazy.
In fact, crazy enough to be a trend.
The first was an announcement that plans to change the style [...]

Christine Steele and I were thrilled to see about 50 people attending our financial editing session. I think I may have gotten that many the first year I did this session, but only about 20 or 30 each year since. And this time I was even up against Merrill Perlman’s always-popular “If I Knew Only” [...]

Ruth Thaler-Carter has been a full-time freelance editor for several decades. Ten tips distilled from her talk:
* Keep connected to everyone. She got one job after attending a Halloween party hosted by a classmate from nursery school.
* Promote your specialized knowledge. She got one job because she was the only candidate who spoke Spanish.
* If [...]

“There are things that can be called rules and there are things that can be called rules for our purposes in the newsroom without actually being rules,” Walsh said. ” … Style is a means to an end. It is not and end unto itself.”

Besides taking down some myths, the message of the session was that style and other “rules” shouldn’t get in the way of clarity, and they shouldn’t make the newspaper sound pedantic. “Don’t treat the reader like an idiot,” Walsh said.

If there was any doubt as to how well copy editors have embraced the Web and social media, it was squashed at the “Ask the AP Stylebook Editors” session.
You could practically see the tweets and Facebook updates flying out of the room as, just before the start of a question-and-answer segment, editors Darrell Christian and [...]

Journalism educators are adapting to a rapidly changing industry, but it’s not easy to figure out what to teach the editors of tomorrow.  A panel, moderated by Andy Bechtel of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, suggested the approach to teaching editing must be broad.
“There is nothing that editing doesn’t touch,” said Deborah Gump, a [...]