This page contains tips on ways to effectively edit and sort the wires.


Browse wire: If you want to quickly breeze through wire slugs in read-only mode, open a wire queue and DO NOT click on a story. Instead, click on the “browse wire” icon first, and the browser will display the latest story in the queue. By using the up and down arrows at the right side of the window, you will be able to browse stories forward and backwards.

If you click on a story first, then double-click on it, the read-only window will pop open and you can begin browsing wire at that point in the queue listing.

Grab text: If you’re combining text from two or more wire stories on the same topic, there’s a quicker way to weave them together than merging the stories and deleting all the redundancy. You can just “grab” the key passages from one story in read-only mode and insert into an open story in InCopy.

Choose the story that will be the foundation and open it. Then go back to the queue and open a story in read-only and highlight the text that you want. Click the “grab text” button – the pencil-like icon on the right side of the text window – and then click open the InCopy story window. Repeat for each section of the story that you want to drop into the other story.

Then use Ctrl-V to insert the text. After inserting, click the “trash grabbed text” icon, the last of the four icons in the grag” tool on the right side of the browser window. If you don’t trash, the next time you use this function, it will keep adding to the copy you previously selected.

Creating digests: The traditional way to create a digest from longer stories is to merge the full slugs and then trim large portions. But the “grab text” tool can be used quickly create a wire digest as well.

Grab text will let you “grab” the key passages from a number of stories in the same wire queue and create a new slug with the combined text in the order that you grabbed it.

1) Double-click on a wire story to browse in read-only. Highlight the text that you want. Click the “grab text” button – the pencil-like icon on the right side of the text window – to grab it.

2) Repeat for each item.

3) Click on the magnifying glass in the right column of the window to view all your grabbed text in a new window. You can edit it in the new window, too.

4) When finished, click “put text” icon below the view text icon. A window labeled “slug?” asked you to name the slug and select a destination queue where it will be created.

5) Type in the slug name, select the queue, click all the “OK” buttons and your briefs package will appear in the queue you designated.

6) After inserting, click the “trash grabbed text” icon, the last of the four icons in the grag” tool on the right side of the browser window. If you don’t trash, the next time you use this function, it will keep adding to the copy you previously selected.