Editing business news stories

Andy Bechtel, a journalism professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, interviews Eileen Cukier, the associate editor at the South Florida Business Journal, based in Fort Lauderdale, on his blog, The Editor’s Desk, about editing business news stories.

Cukier has been at the publication for eight years and the full-time copy editor for six years.

Here is an excerpt:

Q. Describe your job. What’s it like to be an editor specializing in business journalism?

A. I’m responsible for copy-editing every story for our weekly print edition and every bit of breaking news for our Web site. For print, I’m usually the second read. For the Web, I may be the only read. I also write headlines and cutlines for the print edition, write chatter for and double-check charts and maps, cut stories to fit their assigned layouts and do some page layout from scratch. (When the design editor is out, I do all of the page layout.)

SFBJ is one of American City Business Journals’ 40 local business newspapers nationwide. As such, we feature people who are leaders in the local business community. We report on local, state and national issues that impact our readers’ businesses and help them grow their companies.

In other words: We’re a niche publication and don’t cover many of the things a daily paper does. We don’t write for the general consumer, so our coverage rarely overlaps that of the three dailies in our market.

Editing for a business publication is exciting for me because we tend to cover topics that touch large groups of people and have far-reaching consequences.

Read more here.