Quotehanger

  • "There used to be a bloke who gave himself out by walking when he'd hit the ball. The popularity of that within his team-mates may be shown by the fact that since his retirement, they no longer reply to any emails, phone calls or text messages."
    Adam Gilchrist gives a tongue-in-cheek response to his own philosophy of 'walking'

    Oct 12, 2008

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    Articles tagged as: sub-editing

    Klaus Kinski of subbing

    By Will 1 month ago, Comments

    Nice post by the Axe Grinder on the Klaus Kinski of subbing:

    Sub-editors - quiet, unflappable characters who are calm when the pressure is on? Well, maybe not all subs.

    It appears there is one very lively freelance working in London who is causing mayhem wherever he goes.

    A “warning” email was recently sent by the chief sub at Prima, to her counterparts on other NatMags publications. In it she explains the problems she had with this dodgy sub.

    “I just thought I’d offer you a word of warning about a freelancer I had in last week - and urge you not to book him in! During the course of the week, he became increasingly threatening towards another of our regular freelancers, acted in a confrontational manner with our editor, and generally caused uproar in the office!

    “I’ve since heard that he’s been marched from the IPC offices today, after similar behaviour while freelancing on one of their titles. Apparently, he had two girls in
    tears!” Her email ends with her naming the chap in question.

    Not surprisingly, the email has subsequently been read by virtually every magazine sub in the land.

    On one online subs’ forum, the chap has now been dubbed “the Klaus Kinski of subbing”.

    Reminds me of Giles Coren’s brilliantly splenetic email (it deserves a read).

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    ‘Sub-editors will have to change’

    By Will last year, at the start of November, Comments

    A challenging piece from Lloyd Shepherd:

    That said, subs will have to change, and I see that change being an evolution into a profoundly different role: that of curators of the news space created by the news brand. If Arianna Huffington was right when she described news media as having attention deficit disorder while the blogosphere was obsessive-compulsive, then we need some more obsessives around the place to keep the place tidy. By which I mean keeping content organised around topics, farming tags, checking search terms, seeding communities, enriching text with pictures, sound and video. As well as keeping those childish reporters in line with their spelling and grammar. More obsessives required, please. There’s a ready supply on the subs desk.

    This is the why online journalism is such an exciting place: it’s constantly changing. Right now, anyone working in online media needs to be as multi-dimensional as possible, particularly subs. From my experience, the online world needs concise and accurate writers more than ever before. Speed and accuracy are everything, a fact that might suggest the sub’s role is increasingly redundant…but as Lloyd says, there are plenty of other things to satisfy their OCD…

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