Miriam McDonald explains what it takes to be a successful production editor
Miriam McDonald
Miriam MacDonald has been a production editor for more than ten years, working on computer games titles, a travel and property magazine, and, currently, Simply Knitting, a craft magazine at Future Publishing.
How would you describe your role as a production editor?
A production editor’s job varies from title to title, and at some companies the post as I know it doesn’t exist. It boils down to a blend of sub-editing and organisation, because a major part of the job is ensuring that the magazine goes to press on time.
On a word-heavy publication a greater part of the job will be sub-editing and possibly commissioning, whereas on a magazine that uses fewer long articles there may well be competitions to sort out, items to get in for photography and so on to do.
How did you become a Production Editor?
I started out as a Production Assistant. It didn’t require experience, but I had worked on student publications, which I think helped, and I’ve got a first-class degree in English lit. You don’t need a journalism or media studies degree to be a prod ed, but you will have to take grammar and spelling tests before you’ll be taken on as an assistant.
What do you find most satisfying about the job?
Seeing a finished magazine. They’re usually freezing cold when we get the new issues in – refrigerated for freshness, perhaps! - and they have that newly-inked smell. We’ve all worked with the pages for about four weeks, but seeing the final product as the readers see it is fantastic.
What do you find most challenging?
Dealing with readers. How much of this a Prod Ed has to do varies from title to title, and on my current magazine most queries are passed on to my technical editor, but I’m not a people person and sometimes I wish the phone would stop ringing.
What are the key ingredients to being a successful production editor?
You have to be meticulous, both as a sub and as an organiser. If you find yourself worrying about apostrophes at 10pm and wake up in the morning and automatically plan your day, you’re probably right for the job. While being able to write isn’t as critical as it is for a writer, because you’re working with headlines and captions and may occasionally have to rewrite pieces it helps to have some facility with words.
What kind of publication have you enjoyed working on most?
To be honest, I’ve really enjoyed all of them, although I’ve moved every one to three years. I tend to work on magazines about subjects I have an interest in, because there’s no point spending eight hours a day reading about things that bore you. Even so, subject fatigue can set in. Organisation and sub-editing are skills that are useful on any title, so it’s easy to move onto something different.
Please describe an average working day.
Generally it’s a mix of admin and subbing. If I’m at the start of a four-week issue cycle I’ll be checking up on everyone’s holidays, what days our photo shoots are on, looking at deadlines for the cover, bag and any cover gifts that will fall before the print deadline and so on, and then I’ll be writing the bits of the magazine I’m responsible for and ensuring that any items to be photographed will be in by the day of the shoot. I’ll also send out competition prizes and email out requests for new prizes.
If it’s late in the issue, I’ll have more sub-editing to do, so I’ll be checking through articles and contacting designers to get quotes. I try to make sure I work in ‘blocks’, so sometimes I’ll set aside a morning purely for admin and get it all out of the way, freeing my afternoon for subbing.
You need to be aware of how a magazine works as a process when you’re a prod ed, because then you can prioritise effectively. You have to keep an eye on the flow of the whole magazine, so if one part of it’s getting bogged down (your writer’s having trouble getting stuff in, for example, or half your images are stuck in prepress) you can talk to the team about ways of working around the blockages.
The variety of the job is one of its big attractions. As much as I love working with words, doing nothing but subbing all day would probably get dull.
What has been the highlight of your career so far?
Probably working on a launch and getting it running on time. It was an absolute sod of a magazine to organise, so managing it gave me a real sense of having succeeded.
What advice would you offer an aspiring journalist?
Stick at it. Even when you’re a student or working in another profession, keep your hand in by contributing to a student publication or a newsletter of some sort. I’ve got a friend who’s now a professional games journalist who I’ve known since he was in sixth form, and he wrote for student papers, reviewed games for websites and contacted magazines he was interested in with suggestions all the way through his degree. That sort of dedication pays off.
I do feel the amount of unpaid work experience young people are expected to have in order to get into journalism nowadays is a very bad thing, because it excludes talented people who can’t afford to spend all that time working for nothing. Essentially, it’s removing journalism as a career option for working-class kids. However, building up a portfolio while you’re a student goes a long way towards reducing the amount of unpaid experience you’ll need to do.
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