It seems like it’s been forever to get here, but then again some people never make it!
Often on the trade show circuit, people are curious about the origin of Designated Editor. Here we are in brief, but if you want the big-picture view, check out my love-to-travel-but-have-to-work blog:
designatedtraveler.blog4yourbiz.com
Working my way up the New England newspaper food chain, I landed at The Boston Globe after surviving crazy shifts like midnight to 8 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. to noon. I spent six years at The Globe, aiming to join the Travel section, a dream since oh, say, high school. But doesn’t everyone want to work for The Globe Travel section?! Life works in strange ways, and when I realized that in the time it would take to be senior enough to join Travel, I would be laid off.
So I took a buyout in June 2008. And there’s another going on right now. I’m interested to see what the terms are going to be. Either way, I took the summer off to clear my head and then launched Designated Editor.
It dawned on me about four years ago that perhaps my newspaper dream career was dimming. So, I requested admission and was allowed to audit (read: free) Entrepreneurship, an MBA-level class at UMass-Boston. The night after my first class, I was working out at the Globe’s gym and found out a colleague with whom I worked closely had killed himself. It was another shocking death of a newsroom colleague, and the one that convinced me the toll newspapers extract from its workers is just too great and will only worsen with the industry’s decline.
As the mood at The Globe grew increasingly bleak, I was busy taking classes (Accounting, Marketing, Sales), reading 50 books a year, trying to learn everything I could while biding my time and hoping for a buyout. With all this prep behind me and a year of paid benefits (health insurance being key) I took the leap.
The weak link in my prep work was not being to able to really get out and talk to people about what the needs are. The demand for copy editors had always
been high (why they’re paid more than any other newsroom job category),
did businesses really see the need?
Before the Internet, most businesses probably didn’t require copy editing, but as practitioners of “pubic relations” and “consummate professional service providers” can tell you, businesses need copy editing now more than ever!
I’m now concentrating on merging the principles of SEO (search engine optimization) and quality content.
Subsequent posts will center on further development of Designated Editor and the accelerated evolution of SEO.
Thanks for following along!