Subbing – In-company training

Maintaining the quality and style of your content is more important today than ever.

Our range of courses cover all the key elements, and improve the skills of subs and journalists at all levels.

Subbing

Subbing copy requires a range of skills from attention to detail and an excellent knowledge of grammar, to the ability to dream up a pithy headline. This hands-on course breaks down the role of the sub into its numerous parts.

One day in-company course covering:

  • The different roles of the sub - multi-tasker!
  • Quality monitor – fact-checking, following house style, maintaining accuracy in spelling, punctuation and grammar
  • Production controller – meeting deadlines, working with flatplans
  • Creative writer – coming up with reader-relevant heads, sells and captions
  • Brand guardian – controlling tone of voice, language and style across different media
  • Team player – dealing with writers, designers and editors; the importance of negotiation and compromise
  • Self-motivator – proactively setting and achieving goals; developing resilience
  • Time manager – managing one’s own time and working effectively with the timescales of others
  • Handling raw copy
  • Subbing challenges
  • Subbing management

Subbing Online

Subbing online copy requires an enhanced skillset. This highly practical workshop focusses specifically on the skills you need to sub your online content.

Half or one day in-company training course covering:

  • How people read on the web
  • Getting the most important information first
  • What devices are they using and how this affects subbing
  • A systematic approach to copy - hook, structure, order, clarity, sense check
  • What search engines look for and why it matters
  • How this translates to subbing
  • The importance of keywords
  • Identifying key words
  • How much can you control the page title?
  • Creating reader and search friendly headlines and standfirsts
  • Considering where else the headline will appear
  • Checking the first 100 words for key words
  • Effective tagging
  • The importance of images – getting captions and alt tags right
  • Getting keywords near video content
  • The importance of links for users and search engines
  • Finding appropriate copy to link to
  • Optimising related articles
  • Getting key words in link text
  • Creating a checklist for subbing online

Actions and follow-up

These courses provide you with practical skills that you can apply immediately to your own subbing. We send you away with a list of “To dos” to focus on after your training, so you can put into practice what you have learned; and we follow-up with you afterwards to see how you are getting on. We are always available if you have any queries at all, so you just need to let us know.

Loved it. I have massively improved SEO, keyword skills and restructuring of articles.

Bauer Media