Copy editing checklist

Ensure the story is ready for publishing. Check for:

• Spelling
  • If it’s not in CP’s Caps & Spelling, check the Canadian Oxford Dictionary
• Grammar and structure
• Tags
• CP Style. E.g:
  • Punctuation inside quotes
  • Headlines, subheads and captions are sentence case
  • Numbers under 10 written out
  • “Sept. 21, 2015” but “in September”
  • “6350 Coburg Rd.”  but “on Spring Garden Road”
• Names
  • Google any odd names (easy to misspell), or names that have popular variations (“Macdonald” or “McDonald”? “Shauna” or “Shawna”?)
• Dates
  • Check any absolute date (The Halifax Regional Municipality was created on May 1,1996)
  • Check any reference to “xx years/months/days ago”
• Places
  • Check any name you haven’t heard of. (Did we spell “Musquodoboit” properly?)
• Numbers
  • Do they add up?
  • Is a movie ticket price increase from $10.99 to $11.99 an eight or nine per cent increase?
  • If our headline says “12 budget highlights” do we actually list 12?
  • Is Truro a “two-hour drive” from Halifax? Check it in Google Maps.
  • Do we say “a two per cent increase” when we mean “a two percentage point increase”?
  • Put large numbers into context. (Eg: “Irving’s new Assembly Hall would fit 15 buildings the size of the Halifax Central Library.”)
• Facts
  • Are they accurate and do they make sense?
  • Is the Nova Scotia Duck-Tolling Retriever really the province’s official dog?
• Opinions
  • Are we using phrases such as “she admits” when we mean “she acknowledged”?
  • Are they identified as such?
• Fairness
  • We don’t allow people to criticize others without rebuttal. If we couldn’t reach the person criticized, we say so in the story.
  • We don’t allow anonymous sources to criticize named people (We generally don’t allow anonymous sources at all.)
• Attribution and copyright:
  • All media (eg. photos, video) should be properly attributed to the content creator, with a link, where possible. (We never attribute content to a platform, such as “Source: Facebook”)
  • We gain permission to reproduce content from the web and social media, except when we use it as the subject of our story.
  • The phrase “said” implies content gathered in a personal interview. We don’t say a source “said”  when we mean they “stated” (in a news release). We indicate if a source “said” the comment, in a scrum, to other people.
• Legal risk:
  • Alert your instructor to any story stating that someone has done something criminally wrong, for which they haven’t been convicted, or charged by police. The same applies to any ethical indiscretion (eg. a conflict of interest) — esp. one made by a licensed professional. Stories with these types of allegations need to be airtight.
• Hyperlinks
  • Is the link functional?
  • Is the linked text worded clearly? (Does the link text logically suggest the source material? Eg. “The province announced last week that ministerial expenses would be posted online on Sept. 1.”)
• Death:
  • If we mention “the late Graham Downey” we need to be certain he is dead.
• Captions
  • Confirm the spelling of name(s) against those in the story
  • Count the names and the faces. Do they match?
  • Check order of names: left to right
  • Confirm positions of people such as “second from right”
  • Confirm or omit gender attribution
  • Confirm action in caption is actually shown
• Rewrite headlines/subheads and add hyperlinks (if necessary)

Last Updated: October 21, 2019, 4:15 pm ADT