Rosenauer Publishes Another Book

 “The Journalist’s Handbook for Online Editing” will be published Sept. 1 with the Penguin Academics label — a division of Pearson. Ken’s co-author is Dr. Vince Filak, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh. The book has 17 chapters and runs about 400 pages. It covers everything as it relates to online: storytelling, editors, audience, convergent packages, photography, graphics, audio, video, editing copy, punctuation, style, headlines, social media, Web design, marketing, media law, and ethics.

While it will be primarily an e-book — a new approach that Pearson says will become their standard very soon, the book also is available in print, at a significantly higher price, of course.

When Ken first considered writing this textbook, he surveyed the market to see what was out there and how well those books were handling what students need in the classroom. No question that there were many good traditional editing texts on the market — traditional meaning that they were published when journalism was just newspapers, radio, and television and they still gave primary emphasis to those media.

In the relatively short time that the Web has been around, though, it has had an impact on almost everything in journalism. Yet, most of the top traditional editing texts just gave lip service to editing in a convergent setting and editing online media. He wanted to change that.

 

As they write in the Preface for the book: “When we first approached this book, we knew there were plenty of good ‘traditional-media-first’ texts that added a little Web information and considered their focus convergent. We decided to turn the model on its head. ‘The Journalist’s Handbook for Online Editing’ starts with ‘Web-first’ ideology, privileging the Web as the primary medium. Certainly, we relate key concepts and ideas to traditional media, but we do this only to draw parallels and show similarities.

“You have in your hands a textbook that delivers on the promise of its title. It’s a handbook for journalists who understand the power of the Web and who seek to deliver content there worthy of this rich new medium.”

He and Vince have worked on the book since March 2010.