JAROD DAILY
Editing Experience
While my love of writing goes back to elementary school, I discovered my strongest skillset significantly later. When I started college in 2002, I began editing because that was the only entry-level position still available at the TCU Daily Skiff. While I intended to simply use copy editing as a way to get my foot in the door and prepare for future hands-on journalism experiences, I was surprised by how much I liked it — and how natural it felt to me. Thanks to that job, I discovered a real knack for taking others' work and cleaning it up. While editing lacks the glory of a byline and often goes without thanks, I found that I preferred the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making a piece of writing shine. I have taken that skillset with me throughout many jobs in the decade-plus since I started editing, and have used that to continue to improve my own writing as well.
The organizations below represent only a sampling of the editing work I have done over the years.
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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
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I worked as a copy editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for nearly six years. During my time at the Natural State's largest newspaper, I performed a number of different tasks. As a rim editor, I was the first editor to read a story with fresh eyes, looking for holes, inconsistencies, and fact errors in addition to grammatical and style errors. This task also included writing headlines for every story. Eventually, I was trained as a slot editor, which involves seeing all the articles in a particular section after a rim editor has read each one. The main role of a slot editor is to review others' work to evaluate headlines and assess whether each story still has any major holes, rather than to focus on grammar or style minutiae.
I also frequently filled in as wire editor, a job that required a completely different skill set. As wire editor, I selected, edited, and sometimes combined pieces from a number of different wire services, such as The Associated Press, Bloomberg News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more. In addition to sharp news judgement, this job required excellent multitasking and time-management capabilities: There were nights I had to prepare upwards of 20 articles for publication, and monitoring of the wires for further news was required at all times. Finally, several times a month, I also worked as lateman, a job dedicated to being the last line of defense against error. This task, which involves reading page proofs after at least two other copy editors have already read each story, as well as checking the final version of the next day's issue as it comes off the press, means a lot of very late nights: I was unable to go home until 1 a.m. or later on nights I was lateman.
My time at the Democrat-Gazette allowed me to hone my editing capabilities to a very fine point and sharpen my understanding of news value. It also taught me the importance of deadlines, how to work under pressure, and how to cut a long story down so that it fits in the allotted space. Finally, it was through this job that I really learned how important each individual's role can be in a large organization: If one person falls behind, everyone else must help carry the load, because the work must be finished somehow.
In this sample (PDF) of my work at the newspaper, a campaign story from 2008, I have paid special attention to cutting analysis and speculation from the paper and ensuring objective word choice, in addition to the usual concerns of a copy editor. The Democrat-Gazette prides itself on objective news content, so this type of work was often necessary.
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UALR Department of Rhetoric and Writing
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Also during my time at UALR, I assisted the Department of Rhetoric and Writing with a variety of editorial tasks as an editorial consultant. My biggest responsibility was editing and helping to maintain the department's official website. This task required using Wordpress, which UALR uses to build all of its native sites, so as I edited, I also learned enough coding to fix problems as they arose, and I generally became more familiar with how Wordpress works.
I also edited other materials for the department and its Composition Program. One project I particularly enjoyed was editing content for custom textbooks for use in Composition classes. That task let me learn a bit about the textbook industry. Another project I worked on was a printed and digital program for the Southern Regional Composition Conference, a new academic conference started in 2014 by UALR and the University of Central Arkansas. On that project, I conferred with campus leaders planning the conference as I checked the program to ensure its accuracy and grammatical correctness before it was sent to the printer. I also edited a number of smaller projects for the department, and made my editing services available on a freelance basis both to individual faculty members and to graduate students hoping to submit work for publication.
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WPA: Writing Program Administration
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Toward the end of my time in UALR's Professional and Technical Writing program, I had the opportunity to edit for an academic journal. In 2014, the Council of Writing Program Administrators selected Dr. Sherry Rankins-Robertson, UALR's director of composition, and Dr. Barbara L'Eplattenier, a professor of Rhetoric and Writing at UALR, as co-editors of its journal, WPA: Writing Program Administration. These two faculty members selected me as assistant editor, giving me a chance to put the editing skills I had honed since 2002 to use in a new way.
My responsibilities as assistant editor included many of the same duties I'd held in previous editing positions: basic copy editing, evaluting content, looking for major problems in clarity and organization. Additionally, I developed procedures for checking lists of works cited for accuracy, learned about publishing permissions, and gained more exposure to academic writing than I'd ever had before.
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TCU Student Publications
As a journalism student at Texas Christian University, I took advantage of the hands-on learning experience of student publications starting in my very first semester. I started as a copy editor at the TCU Daily Skiff (now skiff x 360, a weekly tabloid-format publication), and over the course of four years I did a little bit of just about everything: I covered the administration beat and general assignment shifts; I wrote sports and feature stories as well as opinion columns; I took a few photos and helped design a few pages; and above all, I edited. And edited. And edited some more. All eight of my semesters at TCU, I was a copy editor, copy desk chief, or associate editor at the Skiff, often in addition to other duties. One semester, I was both a staff reporter and a copy editor; another semester, I was copy desk chief at the Skiff while also pulling double duty as managing editor of its sister publication, Image magazine.
My experiences at TCU were how I first found my strong editing skillset, and first began to learn news values. In addition to skills I would further hone later in my professional career, I picked up valuable multitasking and teamwork abilities. Balancing multiple publication jobs with my schoolwork and other extracurricular activities was a new challenge for me, as was working so closely with such a diverse staff to put out a product every day. These jobs provided me a firm foundation for me to build upon in my professional career as a writer and an editor.