Plastics Recycling Update Spring 2025
I edited and curated the annual issue of the Plastics Recycling Update magazine.
I edit in all senses of the word: overseeing a team's news coverage, proofreading, tightening and otherwise improving copy. Associated Press style has been my foundation, but an important point of editing is that there's no one true style for everyone. Each organization has its in-house approach. We simply need consistency and the reasoning to back up our grammatical choices.
Here are several examples of my editing work.
Filters & Sorting
Resource Recycling June 2024
The June 2024 edition of Resource Recycling's monthly magazines, featuring articles about local program closures, the political complexities of recycling policy, and the impact of skepticism over plastic recycling. I edited the entire magazine each month.
'One crisis, and it snowballs': Homelessness and the push to solve it in the southwest metro
Our entire news staff compiled several short, punchy vignettes illustrating the many sides of homelessness in the southwest Twin Cities suburbs — our coverage area included all or part of three very different counties at the time. I organized and edited the project as a whole.
The New Territory issues 06-13
Each issue of The New Territory magazine comprises more than 100 pages of journalism, literature, art and photography from the region stretching between Nebraska and Arkansas. I proofread and edit using a modified AP style. These issues have published since mid-2018.
Whitehead Institute 2019 and 2020 Annual Reports
I proofread two annual reports for the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This project included developing a small in-house style guide for my own use and for future reports. That style included capitalization of some titles even without a following name and the use of Oxford commas and some scientific acronyms, such as protein names.
Filters & Sorting
Before editing: A Southwest News Media education article
To illustrate some of my editing process, this is an unedited version of a Southwest News Media article about a local school district struggling with year after year of falling enrollment.
After editing: A Southwest News Media education article
Here's the finished version of the same article. The lede is simplified and emphasizes the impact of the story: that the enrollment trend isn't turning around and a school might close as a result. We need to quickly hear from the people affected — district leaders, teachers and families — so I put a brief rundown of these different perspectives early in the story. Much of the rest of the article is also reorganized or reordered for a clearer and more manageable train of thought.
I might make a few other changes today, but under deadline pressure and with multiple other articles to juggle, this one still comes out much stronger.