Editor

I'm an editor. That's the title I give to people, it's what my job is, or at least part of my job. I get to write, but I also have to dig through the submissions that come to SQLServerCentral and somehow determine if they're worthy for publishing and get them scheduled.

I used to get relatively few submissions, 2-3 a week and for the longest time that meant I had to solicit or find 1-2 a week on my own. We've rerun content on Fridays, so I had 4 new ones a week that I needed to get. Things have changed now and I tend to get at least 4-5 a week from all over the world and in all levels of quality.

That's good in many ways. I don't have to write my own, or bother Andy or Brian to write one each week, which is the way it was for quite awhile. We scrambled on some weeks trying to get something done for the newsletter. It also means I don't stress about it since I'm typically a few weeks out. Actually I scheduled content today (I batch it up) and I'm scheduled through Dec 1.

However the quality has gone down. With so many people sending things in, I find that most of them don't write well, especially those from outside the US. I can't say I blame them since English is very hard with all it's inconsistencies. I do need to go over the articles more carefully and often results in 2-3 drafts from them with me sending it back with comments. I hate to rewrite their article and try to give them hints, but when I'm sending back almost as much as they wrote (by character count), that's frustrating. It does make me feel I should rewrite things.

I went through lots of content last week, sent a bunch back for rewrite and then thought I was good to go to Orlando on Thursday. When I checked my queue on Friday afternoon, there were about 15 articles in there and I dreaded going through them. Actually about 6 of those were videos from Red Gate, so those were easy and I went through them first this morning.

Since then I've been editing articles, making comments on some, cleaning others up, and I wound up with about 6 good articles to schedule, along with 4 that I'd edited last week. So I got a good schedule of stuff done, but I still need to get through 2 or 3 more that I can send comments back on. So more work tomorrow before I can put articles to bed for a few weeks.