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OrangeTV: I can understand the need to edit a bit for space, but its very frustrating to work on a piece for hours and hours only to find it randomly hacked to bits in final form. This last one barely made sense by the time they were done. It wasn’t even the “harsh stuff” that they chose to cut. Is that normal lately? They usually don’t do that. I’d prefer they allow me to create a shorter version myself …
Question: OTV is complaining re: the amount of stuff left out of his Sunday Handle Extra review re: the Flying J restaurant cuisine. You can read the two versions for yourself SR here and Get Out! North Idaho here. Have you ever written copy for any publication that got editted more than you thought necessary?
D.F. Oliveria is a columnist and blogger for The Spokesman-Review. Huckleberries Online was judged the best 2008 Idaho newspaper blog by the Idaho Press Club. And the best 2007 news blog in the Pacific Northwest by the Society for Professional Journalist. Print Huckleberries is a past winner of the Herb Caen Memorial Column contest by the National Association of Newspaper Columnists. The Readership Institute of Northwestern University cited this blog as a good example of online community journalism.
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Sisyphus on May 04 at 12:04 p.m.
“editted more than you thought necessary”—certainly not in this case. ;-)
Cindy_H on May 04 at 12:09 p.m.
Couple times. Only one really bothered me. The Chicken Soup folks reworded the ending to one of my stories and it was just flat and awful. I did have the final say, and signed off on it anyway. Freelancers can’t afford to be prima donnas, but every time I read it, it bugs me.
And my first editor at the S-R once had me rework an ending to a column a bunch of times. “Surprise me!” he said.
So I did.
And when the column was re-printed in a Chicken Soup volume they kept my original ending.
Surprise!
hehe
hhuseland on May 04 at 12:10 p.m.
While I sympathize with Orange, I submitted a “can’t miss” story two weeks ago and it was cut twice, not that it mattered, because there was no handle extra in any of the northern areas of Kootenai County in the Sunday paper. Bayview, Athol, Rathdrum Spirit Lake. Even the boxes didn’t have them. There may be other areas that were missed, too, but these I’m sure of.
trishgannon on May 04 at 12:59 p.m.
In the days before I owned the River Journal, when I merely wrote for it, I was assigned to write a story on the publication of the “Beautiful Bonner” book, a compilation of local history put together by the historical society. I was told I had to cut it by 75 PERCENT! in order to fit the space available.
I had cut it in half when I finally blew, standing up and storming out the door shouting, “Why don’t you just slit my f’ing wrists, it would be easier!”
I never like to cut, but I think that’s the most I was ever bothered by it. It was a damn fine story before cutting, by the way, all 1500 words of it.
Digger on May 04 at 1:11 p.m.
I have a word limit of 650 max with my column in the Daily News. I’ve only surpassed that a couple times and Murf does a good job of trimming my columns down to fit. I’ve never actually had him cut more than a couple style errors.
Bent on May 04 at 1:15 p.m.
The trick is never to marry your words… Once you marry your words, editing is a painful process. I always asked for the size of the hole and tried to write to fit, but I usually got cut anyway. It sometimes worked to leave notes to the editors asking them to cut from certain areas of the story — if there was a need to cut it.