Trade publishing is a fun business to be in, and it is challenging too. The challenge is not only the constant need to publish news items, features, videos, interviews and social media updates, but the requirement to publish content into digital and print media.
Keeping track of it what you want to publish, onto which platform and when is a major part of an editor's job. Being organised is essential if you are to meet print deadlines and keep websites up to date.In our editorial office, we receive twenty to thirty press releases per day via email, if not more. Added to that, I receive between five and ten calls a day, at least, from PR agents calling me to pitch articles.
Sifting (or curating) the content to choose the most interesting, relevant and informative pieces to use is the next daily task to carry out, which we do through a 'daily news conference' each morning.
Storing & organising content
The content we are going to use is written into the 'flat plan' for each print issue and saved into a folder on the network for each issue. In addition, there is original content we write in-house which is saved onto the network too.
The content is then 'marked up' and sent to the designers who prepare the page with appropriate designs and the images to make up the magazine.
Format frustration
Publishing the same content creates its own challenge by way of each platform requiring a different format. i.e. The designers get content from us in Word format (.doc or .docx) to use in print through Adobe InDesign. To publish on the website, we run Word documents through 'MarkdownPad' to strip out all the unnecessary code, mark them up in Markdown format, which we then convert to HTML. This is then pasted into the content management system.Time saving content creation
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| Draft - a great tool for writers |
Draft is an online tool (there are free and paid-for versions) to help you create content once and export into different formats.
For example, I write an article in Markdown format on Draft. When I finish the post, I export it into text/Markdown format or HTML for using on our website. Or, I export it in Word format to send to the designers.
Furthermore, I can write a post in Draft and publish it directly into Blogger, Wordpress or Twitter. Working with a tool like Draft saves an enormous amount of time.
Being mobile
But, storing content on a network server presents a problem.
The folders are only accessible when logged onto the network. If I am out on the road, I have to send files to my colleague to save to the network.
We could, of course, use Dropbox which would make it very easy to share content with the 'team' which publishes each issue. The designers and editors can access it whether in the office, at home or on the road.
Content creation apps
The only challenge with Draft is that it works well on a laptop, even when offline. But, it is less good when used on a iPad (which I use most of the time when out and about).There are other apps which are pretty for creating content on an iPad.
'Writing Kit' is a good app which is native to the iPad (i.e. not reliant on a web browser so you can work offline) in which you can create content in Markdown and export it to Dropbox or email the content as a text file to be converted.
'Quip' is a very good app for writing articles on an iPad. It syncs nicely so you can share documents with colleagues in the office to edit them together. But, it only allows you to export it to Word format, which is a bit frustrating. It is easy to share links to documents with colleagues, however.
Being an efficient editor
Creating good content is difficult enough. The last thing I want to do is to waste time struggling to convert it into different formats. That way of working takes you away from researching articles, interviewing people and taking photos.
Being an efficient editor as well as a good journalist helps you provide useful, interesting or entertaining content to your readers. And, it takes pressure off your shoulders, which makes it more enjoyable.
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