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.

Every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. It is a sentence written on every classroom blackboard as a first step to a logic curriculum. It sounds simple enough, right? What does this have to do with editing on Topix?

It is about relevancy. This is a crucial point for the bigger news pages, as well as the smaller, local pages.

For the top news pages, like US News or World News, it is important to be able to step back and consider the big picture when editing. There is a virtual ton of content available in the Topix wire and elsewhere for those pages, but that presents as much of a challenge as a trickling wire does for smaller pages. The task at hand with a wire overflowing with potential stories, is developing a keen eye for plucking the stories from the wire that are the best choices for the page.

Certainly all news that happens in the US does not qualify as US News. I mean, I just had an awesome ham and swiss sandwich for lunch here at Topix Headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, but no one in the next room, much less the next state really cares or needs to know that. That would fall under the rectangle category. What we want here are squares, stories that have national importance and national impact. The results of the New Hampshire primary...that's a square. A change in policy in Iraq....square-city. Congress passes a bill to eliminate income tax...that would be a BIG OL' SQUARE. The key here is to consider the reach of the article. If the news affects life on a national scale, it is US News.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum, we have thriving local communities all over the U.S. With as many news pages as we have, editors have the opportunity to get very niche-y in the pages they choose to edit and the content that they place on those pages. What is sometimes difficult, is keeping those very granular pages very granular. I'll give you an example.

Let's say you are editing the news page for a small town called Palmer, Massachusetts. (Incidentally, I'm picking a random town that has no editor. ) How do you cover the news?

Is a generic article about the war in Iraq relevant? Probably not, but an article highlighting a local angle is certainly on target. Maybe write a short piece about a couple of local Marines like this.

What makes Topix great is the ability to be *truly* local. Smaller towns that are traditionally overlooked by more traditional news media have really found a home here. Our job, as editors for those smaller localities is to bring those people what they can't get anywhere else, local news that matters to them.

Thought for the day - Go for the squares.

At the end of last week, we launched a nifty new addition to your wire results. Some of you have probably already noticed, but in case you haven't, allow me to be the first to tell you. There are now video results in your news wire. That's right, I said VIDEO.

Depending on how much is available for the page you are editing, you will see less or more of this in the wire, but there is a handy way to refine your results to show only video. In the wire search box, type: cat:/news/video-feeds

This search will come in really handy for those of you with fast moving wire pages. At the moment, we are not equipped for editors to upload their own video, but we'd love to explore that a little more down the line. For now, let's see some news pages pop with this new toy. When you use it, link us up in the comments to give other Editors some examples...and competition.

Who doesn't love a good makeover? There is a reason that television shows centering around makeovers and transformations are so popular. We love to see the ugly duckling bloom into the beautiful swan.

Editing Topix pages is like your own internet mini makeover. A page without an Editor is pretty cool, but as savvy and hardworking as Roboblogger might be, he's no replacement for the magic touch of a human Editor. You guys are the ones that turn a ho-hum page into something to be proud of.

I present to you, a post by our own Roboblogger. This one happens to be on our Beekeeping page, but it could be anywhere.

As you can see, the story is kind of a fun one, but looks pretty dry. There is nothing fancy here to grab your eye at all. If only we could edit it. WAIT! WE CAN!

With a little makeover magic, we get a very different look and feel for the post, and one that adds much more interest to the page. The change took all of five minutes. The title has been jazzed up a little to add some zest and shorten it for the sake of the page layout. A quote from the article has been pulled out and placed in the summary using the quote editor tool. Finally, a search on Flickr for a photo of a bee covered in pollen yields this little beauty, which is used under Creative Commons license and attributed to the original photographer with a link at the end of the summary. Nice, huh?

Now, you may not have been aware that you can edit Roboblogger posts, but you sure can. Have you ever gone to your page to post a story and didn't because Roboblogger had already been there? Chances are, even if he posted the story, it looks more like a "before" picture. You can do better, so feel free to give him a hand and edit his post.

Many editors go this extra mile already, but if you haven't delved deeper into the editing tools yet, there is no time like the present.

If you edit a small town's news page, you are probably no stranger to the issue of having to scour the web for news about your town. For smaller locations, there are not always a lot of sources covering your area, and finding current news can be a bit challenging.

The Topix wire is there to help, of course, but as smart as our systems are, they don't catch everything. There is a handy trick you can use when your wire just isn't cutting it. Below, is a snap of the wire for a tiny town called Willow Glen that was incorporated into San Jose, CA about a million years ago, give or take. At this moment, the wire for Willow Glen looks like this:

As you can see, there is some content in the wire, but not much. We're showing about 60 results in the Willow Glen wire. There MUST be more happening in this tiny burg, right? There is!

By doing a title search on any Topix page like this:

You get significantly more results, almost twice as many in this case.

This search will show you all of the content that has the phrase you searched for in the title of the article. Not all of these articles will end up in your wire, but many probably should. (Mental note: Humans ARE better than robots.) If you are having a tough time finding the content you need in the wire, try this search on Topix and see what else turns up. The results may surprise you.

One of the easiest and best ways to format your news stories to stun is to include photos. I know this can sometimes make editors nervous because they are worried about legal restrictions with regard to use of photos or to taking photos at public events. Someone on our team pointed me to this awesome guide to Photography and the Law at Photojojo.com. There is some GREAT information here. I know I learned a few things.

Let's see some photos!

When editing a local news page, there is a trap that as an editor, you should avoid at all costs. Small towns definitely suffer from a lack of new news sometimes. That said, when a big story happens, they can become inundated with new content very quickly. Unfortunately, 99.9% of that new content is going to be about that one big story, right? This is where the trap lies.

If all this new content is now added to the news page in a flurry of excitement, you soon end up with a news page devoted to that one big event instead of your town as a whole.

When that happens and continues for any length of time, you lose readers. Really! You lose readers!

You know how sometimes you hear a song that you just LOVE and you play it and play it and play it, until you get so tired of it that you hope you never hear it again? That’s what happens to your readers. If every time they visit your news page, all they see are multiple headlines about a particularly bad car wreck or a church scandal that made national headlines, they start to get bored and move on. It is always important to cover the big news, but try to never lose sight of the rest of what goes on in your town.

Even in the midst of real tragedy, life goes on in small ways all around you. Make sure those other stories make the news. Don’t forget the local sheriff’s race or the Founder’s Day parade or that giant flour truck that overturned, mixed with rainwater and made pancakes that grilled right there on the asphalt. That’s all good stuff! Make sure it makes headlines too!