{"id":9494,"date":"2016-10-26T13:37:12","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T17:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=9494"},"modified":"2019-05-15T13:47:38","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T17:47:38","slug":"editing-on-deadline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=9494","title":{"rendered":"Editing on deadline"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Oct. 26] I didn’t really sleep last night. Should have been a good night’s sleep, because I was dead tired from two days of driving back from Virginia <\/a>and the emotional exhaustion from the intensity of that visit<\/a>. But duty called.<\/p>\n

I was up half the night waiting for page proofs.<\/p>\n

What a feeling. It’s been years since I waited for page proofs. (That’s the almost-final version of a publication about to be printed on paper.)<\/p>\n

I’ve gotten so accustomed to instant publication online … click on “Publish” and there it is, for all the world to read.<\/p>\n

In a strange twist of my editing career, I’m now helping to produce a print magazine that is a spin-off of an online news outlet that my team started three years ago. In Asia, print is still the way to make money off news.<\/p>\n

As part of\u00a0the Pakistan project, our executive editor Mubasher worked\u00a0for almost a year to get a license for a print magazine. He was told that he couldn’t license the name of our online outlet, News Lens Pakistan<\/a>, because it contains the words “news” and “Pakistan.” The big media groups had lobbied the government for this name ban to preserve their own brands.<\/p>\n

Eventually Mubasher\u00a0decided to use the name of an earlier website we created in 2013, Truth Tracker<\/a>. It’s a fact-checking and promise-tracking site. News Lens grew out of that effort to do high-quality government accountability reporting, including human rights, security and economic development issues.<\/p>\n

Over the past two weeks, our team has been writing and editing 20-some stories for the pilot issue of Truth Tracker magazine. Yesterday morning, I spent three frantic hours giving a last edit to those stories before the pages were laid out.<\/p>\n

I was really glad to have a new iPad that enabled me to do that editing from an armchair in the Air BnB where we stayed in Charlotte<\/a>. And glad that I can still edit on deadline. I caught many errors even in the few minutes I gave each story.<\/p>\n

The magazine was supposed to go to the printers in Lahore at 10 a.m. today – that’s 1 a.m. here. We got back to Atlanta around 7 p.m., and I unpacked the car, grabbed dinner, and sat down at my desk to give the page proofs a look.<\/p>\n

Things inevitably get messed up during layout. The wrong version of a story is used, the ending gets cut off, the headline is misspelled, a caption gets dropped, table of contents doesn’t match what’s on the pages … these are all things that need to be checked before the pages go to the printer.<\/p>\n

But our page designer Fraz emailed to say that the pages weren’t done yet. “Rest a few hours.”<\/p>\n

I tried to just relax, do other things, but it was hard to concentrate. I emailed again. Fraz said he’d have Mubasher call me when the pages were ready.<\/p>\n

At 11 p.m. I told Tom to go to bed, and that I’d sleep in the recliner so that the phone call didn’t disturb him. I really wanted to be snuggled in bed with Tom, after our long journey and all the emotions that we were still processing, but I couldn’t let my colleagues down in the final hours.<\/p>\n

I slept a few hours and had a few naps in the recliner. Never got a call. Kept emailing.<\/p>\n

I got up and had coffee and breakfast. Collected my glass and tools for art class this morning at 10.<\/p>\n

At 9:19, the page proofs landed in my inbox.<\/p>\n

For 30 minutes, I raced through them, writing an email for each fix.<\/p>\n

One paragraph made me laugh even as I wrote an email with URGENT as the subject line: A mentor had inserted a comment, “WHAT DOES THIS QUOTE MEAN? MAKES NO SENSE” and it was still in the story.<\/p>\n

I was late for class. I was really tired. I was worried that I’d missed something in the rush.<\/p>\n

But my colleague Michelle followed up and read the proofs too, and Fraz corrected them. And on\u00a0Tuesday, November 1, there will be the\u00a0Truth Tracker Pilot issue<\/a>\u00a0on the streets of Pakistan.<\/p>\n

Today’s penny is a 2012, the year that our team began its first project in Pakistan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Oct. 26] I didn’t really sleep last night. Should have been a good night’s sleep, because I was dead tired from two days of driving back from Virginia and the emotional exhaustion from the intensity of that visit. But duty called. I was up half the night waiting for page proofs. What a feeling. It’s … read more Editing on deadline<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[52,1318,203,114,112],"class_list":["post-9494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-52","tag-editing","tag-journalism","tag-pakistan","tag-sleep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9494"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9727,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9494\/revisions\/9727"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}