A week in the life of the CIEP’s information team

The information team is made up of the information director (currently Abi Saffrey), plus commissioning editors (at the moment Cathy Tingle and Liz Dalby; Harriet Power and Julia Sandford-Cooke will join the team in early 2022). We work quite closely as a team, though we all work slightly differently. We have varying areas of interest outside the core skills of copyediting and proofreading, too, and this helps when we come to divide up work between us.

The information team editors are paid for 15 hours per month of their time, so the work is very much part-time and must fit in around other client work, plus various caring responsibilities such as looking after children, not to mention outside interests and downtime. In practice, this means we tend to spend a little time most days on information team work, as there’s always something to be done!

What we work on

The work is a combination of dealing with small tasks as they arise, commissioning and compiling recurring content for the two newsletters (columns, book reviews and round-ups), and commissioning or writing one-off blog posts or fact sheets, plus longer-form focus papers and guides. We also look at material on the website that needs updating or rewriting, and we answer various questions from members and other interested parties via our team email address. We all write content when necessary, such as blog posts and fact sheets, and Cathy also compiles the quiz – a bimonthly feat of humorous ingenuity.

Who we work with

Abi is our main interface with the Council, but we also all communicate directly with various Council working groups, such as the Values Working Group (ValWG) and the Environmental Policy Working Group (EPWG). We also sometimes work with other directors, especially the training, marketing and communications directors. To get resources laid out and looking as they should, complete with CIEP branding, we work with the design team via the CIEP’s design coordinator, Rich Cutler.

Cycles of work

A typical week, if there is one, is therefore a combination of ‘keeping things going’ – answering emails, communicating with regular contributors, making corrections to existing resources – and working on new resources and content. We all watch what’s happening in the forums, to see what members might need, and we stay in touch with the wider world via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, for example, to find ideas and contributors from the CIEP and beyond. If there are patterns to our work, they are governed by where we are in the publication cycle of the two newsletters – they go out in alternating months. Each of us usually has several longer-term resources that we’re working on at any given time.

The content we produce is both inward-facing (for members of the CIEP) and outward-facing (for non-members of the CIEP). The Edit and Editorial Excellence are our two newsletters, for members and non-members respectively. These help us highlight new resources and other relevant content. Each issue has a loose theme, which we decide in advance. Both newsletters are a real team effort, with content drawn from all three of our remits and the many contributors we work with. Abi also runs the blog, as she has done for several years, and a lot of our content is hosted there and linked to from the newsletters.

Team spirit

We keep in touch with each other via Slack, which enables us to work together although we are in distant corners of the UK – Cathy is in Scotland, Abi in the east of England and Liz in the southwest. There’s usually a conversation going on about some resource or other, or a task that needs doing or a decision to be made, and occasionally personal things such as birthday cake, children with colds, or holidays. We all understand that we have other commitments, so although we all try to respond as quickly as we can, we’re not on call 24 hours a day. Although we rarely meet in person, especially right now, the regular communication we share helps us feel like a proper team. When so much of what we do in our professional lives is done alone, this is a real pleasure.


Check out all of the CIEP’s resources!


 

About the CIEP’s information team

The CIEP’s information team works with contributors across the globe on guides, focus papers, fact sheets and, of course, blog posts. If you’ve got an idea for a resource, get in touch: infoteam@ciep.uk

 

About the CIEP

The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) is a non-profit body promoting excellence in English language editing. We set and demonstrate editorial standards, and we are a community, training hub and support network for editorial professionals – the people who work to make text accurate, clear and fit for purpose.

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Photo credits: information by Philip Strong; info by Giulia May, both on Unsplash.

Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

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