Tara Bryant

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Editing, design and social media portfolio

As I’ve started applying for post-graduation jobs, I’ve looked back on old cover letters I’ve written for guidance. In my cover letter for the copy editing internship at The Dallas Morning News, I explained my editing experience and said I wanted to learn more design, online and social media skills. I have grown in all of these areas during my internship at The Morning News, and I look forward to setting new goals for myself wherever my next job is. I have certainly not learned all there is to know about web publishing or even copy editing — I learn more every day.

Here are some of the headlines I’ve written, pages I’ve designed and tweets I’ve crafted for The Dallas Morning News this summer.

Headlines:

I probably write about 6 headlines a night on average, so I’ve written nearly 400 headlines this summer. I’ve written headlines for stories about fatal shootings, China’s stock market, presidential candidates and (clearly) much more. While I’ve strived for 1A stories and headlines all summer, I’ve realized some of the most fun headlines I’ve written have been on features and not on the front page. Only the “Done and dunk” headline below is from 1A; the rest are from the metro or business sections.

Page layouts:

Before this summer, I had lots of experience with InDesign but little experience with newspaper page design. In just a few days, I learned a new application — CCI LayoutChamp — and incorporated some of my editing skills to give important stories better play and helped trim some longer wire stories. This is just a taste, as I hope to design more pages soon!

Tweets:

I’ve had a blast tweeting from @dallasnews this summer. Among the tweets I’ve included are several tweets on the same story. A cool thing I’ve worked on this summer is tweeting stories out multiple times either with new information or a new angle. I’ve learned to know your audience and how much it can mean to be first with information. For instance, the death of director Wes Craven — someone unrelated to Dallas — got a lot of retweets (and favorites, for some reason). For some readers, The Dallas Morning News was their first source of the news because we were fairly quick to tweet it out, even before there was a story.