Recently, we had a great opportunity to attend a four day fellowship program on Online Journalism put on in joint fashion by the Knight Ridder Digital Media Center and the USC Annenberg School of Communication. One of the speakers, Rachel Nixon, former deputy world editor of BBCNews.com, had some tips for writing article headlines and summaries for online news content. If those tips are good enough for the BBC, they are certainly good enough for us.

1. Use Short and Straightforward Headlines

6. Include context and background.

You might think that is a lot of information to cover in four paragraphs, especially when presenting only one idea in each paragraph, but here comes the most important tip.

7. Use simple and unambiguous language.

Topix editors have this fantastic platform with a wire system to make finding relevant stories fast and incredibly easy. The more difficult part, and what sets superstar editors apart from the pack, is the ability to enhance those articles either through adding other content, like photos, quotes from the article itself, or writing great summaries. For those of us, that may not be natural writers, writing article summaries might be a little intimidating. Simplifying the process with these guidelines might ease a little of that pressure. Each summary doesn't need to be seven paragraphs of flowery language and creative writing, it just needs to cover the basics. News, by its very nature, is ever-changing, and the most important function of editing is getting fresh news out there whenever you can.

If you are a fan of television like me, the recent news of the writer's strike may be a crushing blow. I'm already reaching panic mode over what I am going to do if I don't have LOST to look forward to after the first of the year. Seriously. What am I going to do?

What may come as good news to those of us who enjoy a reality show now and again, is the fact that in the face of a writer's strike, we are likely to see more offerings on the reality show front. You know why? Life is unscripted.

Topix has a slew of news pages devoted to television shows, including the reality genre.

We could use a few good folks editing these pages as more and more people turn to the cold comfort of unscripted television in these dark days of the writer's strike.

If you are up to the task, sign on to edit these babies.

Survivor
The Biggest Loser
America's Next Top Model
The Amazing Race
The Bachelor
Dancing With The Stars
American Idol
Kid Nation

1. a ghastly left-navigation

2. splitting our Search box into multiple panes

3. highlighting categories on search results pages

4. wiki-style inline links to related categories

5. guiding users into our comprehensive but unwieldy directory

But none of these ever really seemed to work well.

Until now.

Behold... "Spotlight Search"

Now appearing in the upper-left of every Topix page, you'll find a conventional looking search box that does the unthinkable: It actually helps you find categories of news.

Yes, we know it's crazy talk, but just give it a whirl and you'll see. The type-ahead functionality draws from a list of categories (as opposed to the "frequent searches" you'll find on other sites) and the breadth of exposure is pretty dramatic.

Start typing, and in as few as 3 characters you'll start getting deep-links to a lot of great edited & robo-blogged pages. Want to run a regular keyword search? Click the "Search" button and you'll be taken to the good-ol' index of most-recent results.

Hats off to "Skate-Rat" and "The Mage (+25)" for dreaming this impossible dream.