Caroline McMillan Portillo is a reporter for the website Bizwomen.com. In this interview with The Edit Desk, conducted by email, Portillo discusses how reporting and editing work at Bizwomen.com.
Here is an excerpt:
Q. Describe your role there. What do you do on a typical workday?
A. Right now, the reporters on the Bizwomen team are each posting about three stories a day. The goal is to get to four.
I come into the office around 9 a.m. (ACBJ is headquartered in Charlotte), and usually leave around 7 p.m. When I come in, I immediately start combing other sites and Twitter for any big news in the world of women in business. This could be earnings for a Fortune 500 company with a female CEO, a tech giant’s diversity report or buzz around a high-profile controversy. These early-morning posts are quick hits, and it’s OK if they’re short. The goal is to make sure that we always have fresh content and are staying on top of the biggest stories.
Around 10:30 a.m., we have our morning editorial meeting, where we discuss what we’re working on, including what we expect to file that day and any longer pieces we’re working on. Right now, our official Bizwomen team is quite small — just me, another reporter and our editor — but we also have freelancers and can pull stories from all of the ACBJ publications around the country for our site — similar to how newspapers can use wire copy from other papers in their chain.
That doesn’t mean we’ll never cover those stories ourselves. But if another market already has a story written on a topic we’re covering, we can post it and then figure out another way to extend the story in a different way, often getting multiple posts out of the same story line.
Read more here.
