Copy Editing
This heavily reported enterprise story came in with several issues. Mainly, several of the numbers in the first section of the story were incorrect. All percent change equations the reporter executed were done wrong on the first try. Later in the story, Jennifer Stringfellow was misidentified as president of the EIU-UPI union when she has been out of the role for at least a year now. Several of Brittany Tierney’s statements were walking the line between true and false and needed to be removed or adjusted. All of her included statements required me digging into Illinois Department of Higher Education documents. Additionally, there were style and grammar errors throughout the piece, and many sentences required reworking to better explain the terms within them.
The unedited version can be found here.
This ribbon-cutting story had to be completely redone. There were several instances of opinionated language in this one, like the original lede and ending. There were tons of misspellings, from Michele McDaniel’s name to buildings within the library. Style and grammar were all over the place in terms of quality, and the story was not properly organized in terms of where each graph was placed. A major math error was also made in the original third graph. The photo captions on the original story were just as rough on misspellings before being rewritten.
The unedited version can be found here.
Story 3 - Student government approves D&D RSO
This quick turnaround student government story lacked a lede and was reported in the order the meeting happened, not order of most importance, requiring a rework. The Dungeons and Dragons club was rearranged to the top as it was the most interesting and impactful thing to our campus audience at that meeting. Ameenah Morris’ appointment was important, but it was maybe two minutes of the meeting spent voting to send her with no other information attached. The library speaker was sharing information that had been reported on previously and was not as interesting. The end of this piece stacked together all of the mini committee reports, but several of them were not important enough to include, so they were cut. Additionally, the story struggled with when to capitalize titles and general style and grammar issues.
The unedited version can be found here.
When this story first came in, it was pretty heavily underreported. The reporter had a great idea talking about allergies in the on-campus dining halls, but the first attempt at executing it was lacking. He was still unsure what service EIU used, written here as Seaboarding when it is actually CBORD. I sent him back out with a mission: get more information from the dining department, rewrite your lede and figure out what other universities do. I told him if he wanted to take this story a step further, he needed to go bigger. Three more interviews and a trip to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign later, the final product gave a better look at how Illinois colleges report their allergens (and how EIU does not). Along the way, a source had to be cut for ethical concerns, and several style mistakes and misspellings were corrected.
The unedited version can be found here.
This feature piece contained lots of good details and narrative, but it was a bit of a mess on the technical side. Nola Klepzig-Hagan, the main source, had her name misspelled in almost every instance. This reporter also reverted to using first names exclusively for some parts of the story when our style uses last names on second reference. Almost every sentence contained an AP style or a grammar issue.
The unedited version can be found here.