All copy editing and article submission is done online. Our staff writers this upcoming semester will be required to log in and use our CMS to write their articles. When it’s ready, it’s sent to the editor. Once the story is ready, it’s sent to our “virtual copy desk” where copy editors are notified of a new available story to copy edit. Afterwards, it’s sent back to the editors where they can go ahead and publish it online and also download the story in a .incx format for easy importing into InDesign for the print edition.

We use Wikipedia’s diff engine to compare versions between articles and track what was changed when.

We maintain different budgets for online and print, as we treat our online and print divisions as separate publications.

In our Django site, we have story concepts which are assigned to reporters (and unassigned ones, which reporters can claim). When the reporter goes to write a story, they first assign it to a concept, which marks the concept as entering our CMS.

While reporters are working on the story, they mark it as draft (which we have a drop down menu to select). When the story is complete on their end, it is marked as “Pending Review.”

Every night (we are daily), we have two copy editors look at each story, marking the story “Edited (1)” and “Edited (2),” respectively. Then, the night-shift editor does a cursory glance over and marks the stories “Published,” which sends them to our site.

@Joey: Editors keep track of due dates on their own, but I’ve thrown out some suggestions. It may be something to revisit.

The Hurricane is twice weekly, so stories for print are planned about a few days to one week (sometimes more) in advance depending on the section. Sports is obviously a different equation because most coverage is of games and matches.

We learned a long time ago to have the reporter use a slug line instead of a headline. Each section editor is assigned a specific key stroke ($ & %, etc.) that is added to the slug line when he/she edits the story. The online editor (a section editor in our scheme) approves the story after an acceptable number of editors has reviewed the story and writes and headline in place of the slug line before activating it online.