Editing and trimming the news article “It’s a minefield’: US restaurant workers leave industry during COVID-19”
The article trimming assignment was one of my first experiences with journalistic editing. It required comprehensive edits to address structure and readability and copy edits to address parallelism and punctuation. The Purdue Writing Lab and Poynter Journalism were valuable resources as I evaluated the article from a journalist’s lens.
My goal was to preserve the author’s purpose while reformatting the content into an inverted pyramid structure, with a “clear opening theme explaining what is at stake, backed up with support” (Machin & Niblock, 2010, pg. 791). After reading the article, I had to determine the main objective and then decide what to remove to meet the word requirement. In an effort to craft a document that is “clear, accurate, clean, [and] brief” (R. Brunson, interview), I separated complex sentences, removed redundancies, and eliminated segments that were not directly relevant to the main idea. The final article is a clear comparison of the struggles of the industrial worker during the COVID-19 pandemic, versus concerns about labor shortages and unemployment benefits.
References
Machin, D, & Niblock, S. (2010). The new breed of business journalism for Niche Global News: The case of Bloomberg News. Journalism Studies, 11(6), 783-799. DOI: 10.1080/14616701003760543