Yes, hard to believe, but college basketball season is here and the sports team at GateHouse Media's Center for News and Design is once again offering great coverage for your ACC, SEC and Big 10 hoops fans.

In case you're feeling defensive of your own writing, here are specific ideas to tighten your copy. You can even do a search (usually Control F or Command F) to look for these offensive words or phrases and cast them out of your writing forever.

Here's a list of 20 typefaces (actually, 16 typefaces and four complete groups) I'd toss, along with a few words why:

The Associated Press on election night will have video interviews with staffers and other shareable content from across the U.S. to augment its reports to members and customers worldwide.

AP will offer that expertise to its member news organizations, customers and the public across all platforms when it counts the vote and covers the results.

How do legacy print websites stack up against websites not connected with newspapers in terms of the mobile web experience? And, how can they improve?

Here's the deal: Newsrooms across the industry are more squeezed than ever, and that is not going to change in the foreseeable future. Indeed, it's almost a sure thing that we will see additional downsizing as we figure out how to replace declining print revenue with various digital revenue streams.

It's the nightmare that haunts us as we try to fulfill our mission as indispensable news gatherers for the communities that depend on us. And there are no silver bullets to kill the "reality" werewolf that we sometimes feel breathing down our necks.

So what are frightened editors and their staffs to do? In the spirit of the Halloween season, here are five demons haunting our newsrooms, and some suggestions for how to exorcise them.

Local coverage is not just city hall. It includes school activities, social events, summer sports leagues, church services and events, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Civic Clubs – whatever is important and linked to your community ... your market. Get your editor to start thinking a little like a salesman – what would make someone want to read my column?

Renée Tanner is a designer at the News-Review in Petoskey, Mich. A few years ago, Renée and I got to know each other well as we worked together on a redesign of the News-Review.

It was a delight working with Renée because she was bright, quick and ready to learn. The News-Review is a better newspaper because of Renée’s work and I’m happy to see that.

Renée also writes a column for the News-Review. A few weeks ago, she sent me a link to that column along with this note: “Hello Ed. I think you would appreciate my column this week, for you inspired much of it.”

What Renée wrote goes to the heart of how and why we do news design.

Inventor Johannes Gutenberg failed 20 times when creating the printing press, but he saw its value. In comparison, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had followers within six hours because he understood social media's value.

The message that community newspapers also add great value to communities was one that presenter Penelope Muse Abernathy stressed during her "Thriving in a Networked Age" session at the 2016 News Industry Summit, held in September in Sarasota, Fla.

South Florida's Sun-Sentinel has been cited as having one of the country's most innovative newsrooms when it comes to integrating digital and print journalism. Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Howard Saltz told attendees at the 2016 News Industry Summit how getting rid of the newspaper's separate digital "team" resulted in a forward-thinking, fully integrated newsroom with a "reader-first" mentality.