Editing for Today's Newsroom: A Guide for Success in a Changing Profession

Editing for Today's Newsroom provides training, support and advice for prospective news editors. Through history, analyses, and anecdotes, this book offers a solid grounding to prepare potential editors for the full range of their responsibilities in today's newsrooms: developing ideas; evaluating and editing copy; working with writers; determining what is news; understanding presentation and design; directing news coverage; managing people; making decisions under pressure; and coping with a variety of ethical, legal, and professional considerations, all while operating in today’s multimedia, multiplatform news arena. Author Carl Sessions Stepp focuses on editors as newsroom decision makers and quality controllers; accordingly, the book features strategies and techniques for coping with a broad spectrum of editing duties. Covering basic and advanced copyediting skills, it also provides intellectual context to the editor's role, critically examining the history of editing and the changing job of the contemporary editor.

Author Carl Sessions Stepp is professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, where he has taught since 1983. He is senior editor of American Journalism Review and worked a reporter and editor for 12 years with the St. Petersburg Times, Charlotte Observer and USA Today. Stepp has served as visiting writing and editing coach at dozens of newspapers and news organizations and frequently conducts writing and editing clinics for newspapers, journalism groups and other organizations.