Editor, revised

I spent all afternoon in meetings and emerged to find Spokane Valley had erupted in flames.

With blessings from above, I slipped away for a dinner break with my dad, who was in town briefly. Afterward, I went back to work to help with the Web coverage. We had three reporters and three photographers in the field.

My boss whipped up a slicker version of our slideshow tool, which I fed with incoming images. I figured I was pretty much done after I finished linking up related content.

But the news wasn’t finished. I helped the City Desk by taking dictation from one of our reporters in the field, who fed me details about an emergency of declaration by Gov. Chris Gregoire. I threw it into a file and shipped it to the copy desk, where it had been promised as a breakout on the jump page. It was nice to interact with my former co-workers.

Friday morning I’ll be back in the newsroom at 7 a.m., filling in for our morning breaking news editor. I’m sure there will be plenty to follow up on.

I figured I’d post something basic about the work I’m doing as the online editor. Packaging, to be specific. Certain stories lend themselves to grouping words, pictures, resource links, video and other multimedia, and when that happens I get to bring it all together as attractively as possible.

The image is an example from today about some extra water floating around the region. (Note: This being one of the tamer inundations in recent memory, one of our city editors has dubbed it the “Amish flood.”)

Our site is undergoing a redesign, so the vertical page we present will not be around forever. But while it is, I face certain limitations. For instance, all of our breaking news items are presented in a stack, leaving something to be desired aesthetically.

We’re also hampered in terms of workflow. The links gathered under “Flood coverage” were created through hand-coding. Our next content management system will do a lot more with tagging, and I hope to see some of this packaging automated.

When that happens, the person in my seat will be able to put more energy into editorial decisions and less into typing hyperlink tags. The story you find when you click on the headline above is long – a pastiche of new information as it came in today. With more time, each new version could have been a rewrite: short, to the point, and complete.