Editor

There’s no such thing as a typical workweek. You never know what kind of day you are going to have until you get to work and see what phone messages you have, and what is going on in town. And there is a lot of administrative work – payroll, HR issues.

Some careers, it may take years to see the results of your labor. But mine is there daily, waiting for me in my driveway every morning.

I typically get to work about 8 a.m. and work sometimes as late as midnight. Two of my reporters are on a salary, meaning they can work more than 40 hours without being paid overtime, but the rest of my staff is paid hourly, so the burden falls on me or one of my other editors if extra work is needed. We are all supposed to work five days with two days off, but that often doesn’t happen, or when it does, the next week we make up for it by working six days. My typical week is 50-60 hours, and sometimes 70. Also, keep in mind, I do a lot of my work at home. And I often eat lunch at my desk.

This question comes up time and time again in some form, so be prepared for it.

It shows the interviewers you are a modern day thinking journalist. So for example, if this is an interview with a newspaper, in this digital age the first thing you would do is get something up on the website.

Explain how you would get something up and published like: “It has been reported there has been an explosion in an industrial building in Chilwell, more to follow.”

Inform your editor and get someone to check social media for pictures and eyewitness accounts, which you’ll use for quotes for an updated version of the story.

Call the emergency services so they can officially confirm what has happened. What ever you do, keep updating the website with more information.

☛ What do you know about the company?

☛ What made you want to work in publishing?

☛ What career hopes do you have?

☛ What kind of books do you enjoy?

☛ How do you respond to conflicting priorities or juggling many things at once?

☛ What do you think makes good AI and jacket copy?

☛ Are you aware of the considerations involved in designing a book that will be co-editionable?

☛ Describe your current role.

☛ What are your strengths and weaknesses? (The interviewer said: ‘This is a cliche question but it does reveal something about self-perception’)

☛ Why are you interested in working with [genre]?

☛ (Talking about benefits of not being a native English-speaker): But on the other hand, does it put you at a disadvantage with more colloquial language and books that are written perhaps not in perfectly grammatical English?

☛ Sometimes, projects are running late because, say, we’re waiting for input from the author, and he is not responsive. How would you deal with this?

☛ What experience do you have in Picture Research?

☛ Do you check layouts at layout stage?

☛ What things do you pay attention to when you are checking plotters?

☛ Do you have any questions for me?

☛ What are some of the challenges explaining social media to non-technical executives? How do you overcome objections about social media?

☛ If you were working at a firm which blocked employee access to Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites, do you think this is a good policy? If not, how would you convince the executive team to open up access for employees?

☛ What is the difference between moderating something and facilitating something?

☛ What are your strengths in social media?

☛ What are your weaknesses in social media?

☛ Which social bookmarking sites do you use?

☛ What social media tools do you use?

☛ What is your biggest mistake you’ve made in social media? How did you fix it?

☛ Have you ever held a live event in the social space? How would you market a live online event? How would you structure the event?

☛ How do you manage an online reputation? If one of our executives had a bad online reputation (bad press, etc) and wanted to fix it, what would you recommend?

☛ If we had a business crisis, what social media channels would you use to communicate through? How would you manage the messaging?

☛ What areas of social media would you recommend outsourcing?

☛ What are the risks with becoming involved in social media?

☛ Which is the best social check-in site?

☛ Are you the mayor of any place?

☛ What do you do offline to increase your online knowledge?

☛ Everyone needs a break. What do you read on your own time?

☛ How has your work experience prepared you for this position?

☛ How do you sustain interest in even the most mundane aspects of editing – proofreading, fact-checking, source-checking, etc?

☛ What social media platforms work well for increasing the reach of your content?

☛ How much do you know about SEO?

☛ What publishing platforms have you used before?

☛ How do you go about hiring talented people for your team?

☛ Which style guides do you prefer?

☛ Describe your experience with creating style guides.

☛ What advice would you give writers trying to pitch stories to your publication?

☛ What topics would you want to cover in an editorial calendar from October to December?

☛ What’s your approach to giving constructive feedback to a fellow writer?

☛ How do you motivate your team in the face of tight deadlines?

☛ What would you do if you or a member of your team made a very public error or created a PR crisis? How would you handle it?

☛ How would you describe the voice of our brand?

☛ What is one thing you’d change about our publication?

☛ For our business, would Twitter or Facebook be more effective?

☛ Why would we want to continue using MySpace?

☛ Why should we use social media?

☛ What would be the first thing you would do if hired for this position? What would your goal be for the first month? The first year?

☛ Would you use Facebook Like or Facebook Recommend on our site?

☛ What social sites should our company have a presence on?

☛ How would you integrate social media into our site? What buttons or widgets would you recommend?

☛ What percentage of our referral traffic would you think our site should get from social media sites?

☛ Give our company a grade on our current social media efforts.

☛ How would a social check in site benefit our business?

☛ What tabs should we have on our company Facebook page? Which one should be default?

☛ How do you define social media reach? What is the current social media reach our of our company?

☛ What are 5 things you would recommend to us to do immediately in the social space?

☛ How would you get access to a new author when there isn’t an existing relationship with them or their agent?

☛ What exactly would you say to the new author when first approaching them?

☛ If you started this job tomorrow, what would you do first?

☛ Tell us about your interest in [genre].

☛ What do you think a book needs to become a bestseller in this genre?

☛ Tell us about your current role.

☛ What do you think are the qualities you would need in this job to be successful?

☛ Do you write jacket copy?

☛ How familiar are you with the process of signing new authors?

☛ Do you know any agents?

☛ Which newspapers or magazines do you read to keep up with developments in this subject area?

☛ Would you miss working with [different kinds of books I was working with at the time]?

☛ How do you measure success on social media?

☛ What metrics do you use to measure the effectiveness of social media?

☛ How would you tell that a social media campaign has failed?

☛ What key performance indicators would you recommend to report on social media efforts?

☛ Write down a table of contents for a social media strategy.

☛ What elements should go into a social media marketing plan?

☛ Why would we want to pay for social media advertising?

☛ What are the best types of things to advertise on a social networking site?

☛ What analytics software packages have you used?

☛ Describe the most successful social media campaign you have ever seen. What made it so successful? Could you duplicate that level of success?

☛ Describe a social media campaign you ran from start to finish.

☛ Provide an example of a social media campaign you are current running. Show me what channels it is in. Describe the next steps for your campaign.

☛ What are the elements that make a video go viral?

☛ Explain the difference between Facebook Like and Sharing on Facebook.

☛ If you’re planning a vacation and will be out of touch and not able to get online for a week, what tools would you use to ensure social media updates are being posted?

☛ Write three headlines for news stories that you think will have tremendous success on social media. What makes the headline successful? Write a headline for a successful article about our company.

☛ How often should we update Twitter?

☛ How do you handle criticism of a company online?

☛ What would you do if someone started a parody account poking fun at our company?

☛ What is your policy for moderating comments?

☛ Would you pay a blogger to write favorably about our company?

☛ How would you show unique content only to fans on our Facebook page?

☛ Who in our organization should be blogging on behalf of the company?

☛ What is a “sneezer”?

☛ How would you perform competitive analysis in the social space?

☛ What do think about software applications that autofollow or try to get get large masses of friends on social network sites?

☛ What do the statistics look like for a healthy Facebook fan page?

☛ Explain what a retweet is.

☛ What is RSS? Why is it important?

☛ Have you ever gotten a piece of content onto the front page of Digg?

☛ How frequently do you update Facebook and Twitter?

I oversee a newsroom of six; it s a small-town community newspaper, so in addition to being in charge of the daily newspaper, I do a little bit of everything. In fact, I’m one of the six. We have a news editor, a sports editor who is a one-man sports department, a lead reporter, and two hybrid positions – one does reporting three days a week and works the news desk two days a week, and one who does sports reporting three days a week and news reporting two days a week. I also edit all the news stories for style and for mistakes. We still make mistakes. But we just make a correction and go on from there. I tell my reporters to do everything in their power to keep a mistake from happening, but if they are doing everything they can and are giving 110 percent, then I’m not going to eat their lunch.