When I got out of college and decided to work for newspapers despite my degree from the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, I didn't know that my wanting to work on the desk without spending years as a reporter was a trendlet. I just knew that I loved editing and working to put out the Ball State Daily News, while I didn't much enjoy interviewing people, and didn't want to have to wait until I was in my 40s to do what I liked.
So, of course, my first job was as a reporter. But I was lucky -- there was a completely unexpected opening on the desk within months, and I was moved into the job, with a lot of hemming and hawing about how normally this wouldn't happen and of course I didn't have enough experience as a reporter.
As the years went by, I found more people like myself, and by the time I was interviewing people for copy editing jobs or internships, I had found many more -- people who loved the news, loved newspapers, loved the language, and usually were either too shy or too nonaggressive (which are not the same thing) to want to spend years as a reporter. They wanted to work as editors, and a lot of them wanted to be copy editors.
Thankfully, by the 1990s the newspaper business -- thanks to pagination taking so much of prepress out of the composing room and putting it into the newsroom -- had jobs for people like us.
But the job kept changing as technology whipped ahead. The wonderful old mechanisms for getting copy to and from composing, like the conveyor belt with hooks at the Chicago Sun-Times and The Inquirer's pneumatic tubes, fell by the wayside. The copy logs became less important. Physical dummies disappeared, along with the rubber stamps and time recorders that marked their priority and progress, and lots of local-color things that had grown up over the years. (At The Inquirer, page dummies had to be drawn using black, blue and red pencils to indicate different elements.) And more and more, the job became more laying out pages and less editing copy, particularly with pagination.
But at the Flint Journal and The Inquirer I noticed a difference between younger and older copy editors. Many of the older copy editors were of the "copy reader" style -- your main job was to write the heads and check for obvious errors of grammar or a lack of names, but not to go off "challenging the copy" too deeply. And the older reporters and city editors did not take kindly to our doing so. We of the younger school thought it was our job to kick the crap out of the copy if it needed it. In part, this was because the crusty old city editor had been replaced by today's assigning editor. But we took seriously our role as "last editor and first reader." If a sentence didn't pass our muster, even if it was grammatically correct, we took it out or demanded that it be rewritten. If the story didn't meet our standards, we held it out of the paper and kicked it back. If an adjective was superfluous -- death.
We had to, because we had memorable ledes such as this (very close approximation, but not work for word): "Like his namesake, Robert E. Lee loved to fight. But while the Confederate general devoted his energy to harassing the Union army, Lee, of Somesuburb, spent his time beating his wife."
Or the story that had no lede, to which we were told: "The absence of a lede is a lede."
Or the 25-inch story to which a reporter responded to a challenge with "I spent so much time getting one side of the story, I forgot to get the other."
These are low-hanging fruit, but these were stories that had made it to the copy desk. We saw ourselves as copy editors the way Tim McGuire or John McIntyre describe them, not just as people who caught spelling errors and wrote headlines. We wanted to be the consciences of our newspapers, the heart of how they were viewed by the readers. We saw ourselves -- as most journalists see themselves -- as inspired maquis bringing forth the truth. We just pointed our lances internally.
Unfortunately, some of our editors -- and, I would venture, most of our publishers -- saw us primarily as people who got raw copy set into type, whether it was sending flimsies back to composing or paginating the front page. Some of them just didn't care what anyone did as long as it made money, but more of them, particularly on the business side, felt that one editor should catch all this stuff, so why did you need all these layers of editors? People read most of the stories in a minute or less anyway. But times were good, so they didn't start questioning it until newspaper revenue failed to bounce back after the 2001 recession.
Then, they started asking. And then, everyone started being able to publish online without going through a copy desk. Including their own newspapers.
And then it became apparent that what copy editors and their advocates wanted to do wasn't what most newspapers had really hired them for. It was just that you couldn't get a machine to do all this mechanical stuff yet, spellchecking and formatting and toning and such, and since you had to have people to do that, gosh, I guess they might as well edit the stories and write headlines, too. But in the end, they were hiring lots of copy editors (as opposed to the handful they had before) because they were cheaper than printers-added-to-proofreaders-added-to-engravers.
Next: And who's right?
Showing posts with label copy editors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label copy editors. Show all posts
Monday, January 25, 2010
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
What Copy Editors Do
Dean Singleton said the O word about copy editing at a meeting yesterday. ACES' leader, Chris Wienandt, points out far more succinctly than I could why outsourcing copy editing is a bad idea. At this point Dean probably would like anything that would let him pay the bills, and he has always seen copy editing as the sort of back-shop check-processing operation that you only keep until you can figure out a way to get rid of it.
But I do fear that part of what allows people like Dean to bring up these ideas is copy editors' tendency to martyr themselves as underappreciated cogs who will throw themselves into the machine to die rather than let a deadline be missed and then say, If the bosses valued what I was doing they would reward me, but they are not rewarding me so I will do it again just to spite them.
My former colleague Steve Lovelady once described all journalists as shy egomaniacs, and many copy editors I have known fit the bill precisely. Just as often, copy editors say of top editors, "They have no idea what we do." Clearly Dean Singleton has no idea. But yes, we have all known non-copy editors who would look at a story with five major and 20 minor flaws and say, "Seems all right to me. What's your problem?" We often dismiss them as idiots, but over time I have come to see that many of them just don't see what we see, any more than I would see the problematic weld that could bring a bridge down. That, of course, is why you are supposed to trust experts -- but it's hard for many editors to not see themselves as experts in everything journalistic.
If copy editors are only seen as the people who lay out pretty pages and put wire stories in the paper and make sure that we use "who" instead of "whom," then yes, a case could be made for commoditizing that work and selling it overseas for the cheapest rate possible -- not a case I would support, but a case. And I'm sure there are papers that have copy editors who only do that, because I have twice worked for editors who essentially wanted that. There will always be journalists who feel that errors do not undermine larger truths, who see copy editing as quibbling, who just want to go home, who think "alacrity" means "reverently" because it must be what "alack" comes from.
But a good newspaper's copy editor needs to know to look up on a map the street that runs from my town to the Ben Franklin Bridge because it is variously known as Main Street, Camden Avenue, Maple Avenue and Federal Street. and to double-check in which town each name takes effect. That in Philadelphia neighborhood boundaries matter a great deal and in Indianapolis they matter barely at all. That Councilman Bill Green is not the same person as former Mayor Bill Green and that former Mayor Wilson Goode's first name is Willie but it would be a rare occasion when you published it. That Dunkin' Donuts has an apostrophe and that saying "it happened when customers were present" does not mean it happened in the daytime even though police said that. That one state in your coverage area calls the crime DWI and another DUI. That in one state General Assembly describes the entire legislature and in another it is the name for the House. That "the Fightin's" is what people call the Phillies and should not be changed to "the Fightings." That the district attorney's name is Risa Vetri Ferman and not any of the 25 ways you could get that wrong just by hitting the wrong key.
And a newspaper copy editor partly needs to know this from memory so that minutes do not have to be lost checking references -- but mostly a newspaper copy editor needs to know what can go wrong, what questions to ask, what experience has taught him or her. If you don't know Resa Veti Furman seems odd, why would you question it? If you don't think the weld would be problematic, why would you point it out? Oops, there goes the bridge.
The problem for copy editors is that their job consists of catching other people's slipups -- because to err is human -- and thus it seems unseemly to go around pointing out what we do. It makes others look bad, and it's a lot more fun to talk about investigations we want to do. But then owners and business managers look at pages and headlines and say, oh, that's all that copy editors do. The Times of India has pages and headlines too. Hey, let's save money!
It misses the fact that the reader expects the newspaper to be His Newspaper. And he lives somewhere that he expects the newspaper to know as well as he does. And the more we weaken that connection, the more the newspaper becomes dispensible, whatever form it is delivered in.
I expect readers in India feel the same way. There are entrepreneurs there, though, who will be happy to take our money to watch us further destroy ourselves. As long as the check clears.
But I do fear that part of what allows people like Dean to bring up these ideas is copy editors' tendency to martyr themselves as underappreciated cogs who will throw themselves into the machine to die rather than let a deadline be missed and then say, If the bosses valued what I was doing they would reward me, but they are not rewarding me so I will do it again just to spite them.
My former colleague Steve Lovelady once described all journalists as shy egomaniacs, and many copy editors I have known fit the bill precisely. Just as often, copy editors say of top editors, "They have no idea what we do." Clearly Dean Singleton has no idea. But yes, we have all known non-copy editors who would look at a story with five major and 20 minor flaws and say, "Seems all right to me. What's your problem?" We often dismiss them as idiots, but over time I have come to see that many of them just don't see what we see, any more than I would see the problematic weld that could bring a bridge down. That, of course, is why you are supposed to trust experts -- but it's hard for many editors to not see themselves as experts in everything journalistic.
If copy editors are only seen as the people who lay out pretty pages and put wire stories in the paper and make sure that we use "who" instead of "whom," then yes, a case could be made for commoditizing that work and selling it overseas for the cheapest rate possible -- not a case I would support, but a case. And I'm sure there are papers that have copy editors who only do that, because I have twice worked for editors who essentially wanted that. There will always be journalists who feel that errors do not undermine larger truths, who see copy editing as quibbling, who just want to go home, who think "alacrity" means "reverently" because it must be what "alack" comes from.
But a good newspaper's copy editor needs to know to look up on a map the street that runs from my town to the Ben Franklin Bridge because it is variously known as Main Street, Camden Avenue, Maple Avenue and Federal Street. and to double-check in which town each name takes effect. That in Philadelphia neighborhood boundaries matter a great deal and in Indianapolis they matter barely at all. That Councilman Bill Green is not the same person as former Mayor Bill Green and that former Mayor Wilson Goode's first name is Willie but it would be a rare occasion when you published it. That Dunkin' Donuts has an apostrophe and that saying "it happened when customers were present" does not mean it happened in the daytime even though police said that. That one state in your coverage area calls the crime DWI and another DUI. That in one state General Assembly describes the entire legislature and in another it is the name for the House. That "the Fightin's" is what people call the Phillies and should not be changed to "the Fightings." That the district attorney's name is Risa Vetri Ferman and not any of the 25 ways you could get that wrong just by hitting the wrong key.
And a newspaper copy editor partly needs to know this from memory so that minutes do not have to be lost checking references -- but mostly a newspaper copy editor needs to know what can go wrong, what questions to ask, what experience has taught him or her. If you don't know Resa Veti Furman seems odd, why would you question it? If you don't think the weld would be problematic, why would you point it out? Oops, there goes the bridge.
The problem for copy editors is that their job consists of catching other people's slipups -- because to err is human -- and thus it seems unseemly to go around pointing out what we do. It makes others look bad, and it's a lot more fun to talk about investigations we want to do. But then owners and business managers look at pages and headlines and say, oh, that's all that copy editors do. The Times of India has pages and headlines too. Hey, let's save money!
It misses the fact that the reader expects the newspaper to be His Newspaper. And he lives somewhere that he expects the newspaper to know as well as he does. And the more we weaken that connection, the more the newspaper becomes dispensible, whatever form it is delivered in.
I expect readers in India feel the same way. There are entrepreneurs there, though, who will be happy to take our money to watch us further destroy ourselves. As long as the check clears.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Randomness
1. Following my recent posts on the late Red Bank Register, I certainly never expected suburban daily newspapers to go before city ones. Thirty years ago, metro newspapers were on the ropes, and were starting their zoning efforts to try to capture the suburbs. Now papers that are based in the suburbs -- whether large, such as the Orange County Register, or small, such as the now-deceased Noblesville Times, are collapsing. The East Valley Tribune near Phoenix seems to be on its last legs, and the Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., is contemplating Chapter 11. Is this just the coincidence of bad business decisions? Is it national inserters buying newspapers by total metro penetration and punishing ones with huge penetrations in small areas? Or are suburban dailies less essential than urban ones, because you don't have the big government/big sports agenda? Whatever, it continues to amaze me, because I got into the business when everyone was putting their money on suburban dailies.
2. Personal paranoia: As a copy editor, I am starting to feel as if all the half-grudging respect given us in years past was simply pro forma. If all that copy editors did was lay out pages and do the mechanics of producing a print newspaper -- which, OK, at many papers is all they do -- then one can see the weakness in the field. But is not the elimination of error, the honing of language, the institutional memory of fact, important regardless of medium? You can say that "readers will catch it and we can correct it online," but isn't the point to keep the mistakes away from readers? You can say that the resources of the Internet make the sort of trivia arcana that copy editors keep in their heads less necessary, but that still requires a reporter or assigning editor to bring to their own story the critical mindset a copy editor has.
But copy editing positions are being massacred at newspapers, enough that I am now thinking that many of the enconiums about the "last line of defense" were simply the equivalent of crocodile tears -- not so much from reporters, who are generally thankful for the 999 mistakes you do catch even while maintaining a lifetime grudge about the one thing you make wrong, but from managers who think that as long as you get a story on the dart board, it's the same as making a bullseye. (This is decidedly not true of the folks I report to, by the way.) Assigning editors admittedly often occupy the same sort of occupational hell generally reserved for middle-school principals, but they don't get promoted because the percentages in the story add up right or the name of the company was hyphenated correctly, or the stories have (or don't have) all the first names right; they get promoted when their reporters 1) do stories that please the top brass and 2) aren't running in to the editor complaining about their supervisor. This makes the value of copy editors nice, but dispensible. Well, I'm off this weekend to the midterm board meeting of the American Copy Editors Society; perhaps we will find the answer.
I am not sure readers feel the same way, but at least that would be consistent with the theme of this blog that newspapers are in the pickle they are in because they do not think like readers do.
3. The remaining words "Nevius Voorhees" above the store entrance in Trenton reminded me that one of the things I loved about downtown department stores were the brass plaques so many had on their buildings announcing the name of the store. These were admittedly retail hubris; the typical store, as old photos showed, was often covered with gaudy signs, and department stores wanted to show their superiority through understatement. Yet the giant sign on State Street in Chicago reading
MARSHALL FIELD
and
COMPANY
in, what, five-inch tall embossed brass letters said: This is no ordinary store. I can remember these plaques on Ayres' and Wasson's in my hometown, Hudson's in Detroit, Jordan Marsh in Boston, Pogue's in Cincinnati, and many other stores. (An alternative was the serifed letters above the door, looking like a Roman inscription, as in "THE F. & R. LAZARUS & COMPANY" over the back door of the store in Columbus. Never understood why that second "and" was there.) I wonder if anyone took photos of them before they disappeared. I wonder where they in fact went. Did heirs to the store retrieve them before the building was demolished or repurposed?
Newspapers are little better about keeping their physical history. Recently I was in the lobby of the Wilmington News Journal, where there is a large artwork that notes that it was in the lobby of the newspaper's old downtown headquarters but was left there and made its way to the new building on Basin Road circuituously and after some years. There's a similar piece in the Hackensack lobby of the Bergen Record, in a building the newspaper plans to abandon in a matter of months. Will it follow to West Paterson? Or will it simply remain there, a curiosity of newspaper days gone by?
OK, there's not much to this post. Busy week.
2. Personal paranoia: As a copy editor, I am starting to feel as if all the half-grudging respect given us in years past was simply pro forma. If all that copy editors did was lay out pages and do the mechanics of producing a print newspaper -- which, OK, at many papers is all they do -- then one can see the weakness in the field. But is not the elimination of error, the honing of language, the institutional memory of fact, important regardless of medium? You can say that "readers will catch it and we can correct it online," but isn't the point to keep the mistakes away from readers? You can say that the resources of the Internet make the sort of trivia arcana that copy editors keep in their heads less necessary, but that still requires a reporter or assigning editor to bring to their own story the critical mindset a copy editor has.
But copy editing positions are being massacred at newspapers, enough that I am now thinking that many of the enconiums about the "last line of defense" were simply the equivalent of crocodile tears -- not so much from reporters, who are generally thankful for the 999 mistakes you do catch even while maintaining a lifetime grudge about the one thing you make wrong, but from managers who think that as long as you get a story on the dart board, it's the same as making a bullseye. (This is decidedly not true of the folks I report to, by the way.) Assigning editors admittedly often occupy the same sort of occupational hell generally reserved for middle-school principals, but they don't get promoted because the percentages in the story add up right or the name of the company was hyphenated correctly, or the stories have (or don't have) all the first names right; they get promoted when their reporters 1) do stories that please the top brass and 2) aren't running in to the editor complaining about their supervisor. This makes the value of copy editors nice, but dispensible. Well, I'm off this weekend to the midterm board meeting of the American Copy Editors Society; perhaps we will find the answer.
I am not sure readers feel the same way, but at least that would be consistent with the theme of this blog that newspapers are in the pickle they are in because they do not think like readers do.
3. The remaining words "Nevius Voorhees" above the store entrance in Trenton reminded me that one of the things I loved about downtown department stores were the brass plaques so many had on their buildings announcing the name of the store. These were admittedly retail hubris; the typical store, as old photos showed, was often covered with gaudy signs, and department stores wanted to show their superiority through understatement. Yet the giant sign on State Street in Chicago reading
MARSHALL FIELD
and
COMPANY
in, what, five-inch tall embossed brass letters said: This is no ordinary store. I can remember these plaques on Ayres' and Wasson's in my hometown, Hudson's in Detroit, Jordan Marsh in Boston, Pogue's in Cincinnati, and many other stores. (An alternative was the serifed letters above the door, looking like a Roman inscription, as in "THE F. & R. LAZARUS & COMPANY" over the back door of the store in Columbus. Never understood why that second "and" was there.) I wonder if anyone took photos of them before they disappeared. I wonder where they in fact went. Did heirs to the store retrieve them before the building was demolished or repurposed?
Newspapers are little better about keeping their physical history. Recently I was in the lobby of the Wilmington News Journal, where there is a large artwork that notes that it was in the lobby of the newspaper's old downtown headquarters but was left there and made its way to the new building on Basin Road circuituously and after some years. There's a similar piece in the Hackensack lobby of the Bergen Record, in a building the newspaper plans to abandon in a matter of months. Will it follow to West Paterson? Or will it simply remain there, a curiosity of newspaper days gone by?
OK, there's not much to this post. Busy week.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Copy Editing: The Post's Changes
I'd be more inclined to see the changes announced Friday in A-section editing at the Washington Post to be a realistic assessment of a smaller, 24/7 newsroom if I didn't hear Glen Campbell singing "Wichita Lineman" in the back of my head.
It was back during the last giant U.S. economic collapse -- the one in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which many newspapers that had had a decade of unchecked stability or growth in staffing confronted for the first time the reality of investors: We don't care that your business is cyclical and tanked, they said. Give us growth in earnings every quarter. Newspapers had already reaped the savings from getting rid of the composing room. Now they had to cut elsewhere. They started looking at that notorious cost center, the newsroom, and that notorious cost center in the newsroom, the copy and news desks.
(Remember, this is before the Internet.)
Some newspapers just whittled here and there, but others devised what they saw as progressive and systematic responses. The copy desk no longer had the responsibility of feeding type in slugs to the Linotype operators, right? Why spend all that time on an assembly-line production system? Besides, we need feet on the street.
And so emerged ideas like the Maestro concept and "blowing up the copy desk," an exercise in which a number of Knight Ridder papers engaged.
The idea seemed good. Have a copy editor assigned to each section to work on the centerpieces and main stories during the day. They'd be part of the team, working with the reporter and editors and photographers. By working with them, they'd do the most justice to the story and photos. There wouldn't be late tinkering by some cantankerous copy editor bent on spoiling the flow of the story by changing all the "says"es to "said"s or arguing that "Although statistics are hard to come by, it seems apparent that more and more people..." isn't solid enough to state that something is true.
And by doing the editing earlier in the cycle, fewer people would be needed, because you wouldn't have the big bulge in the snake's belly before deadline.
(Remember, this is before the Internet.)
Well, most of us who were around then saw what happened. One of the biggest management problems you face on the copy desk is that the hours and days off suck. Lots of talented people don't want your jobs because they don't want to be at work at midnight on Friday. So a number of copy editors flew to these positions. Nothing bad about that. But they found that much of the day went into thinking about the centerpiece and an off-lede -- the only stories that were actually done during the day and the ones that the top editors would pay the most attention to. They found that they liked to pay the most attention to these stories as well.
The rest of the copy -- most of it -- fell on the curmudgeons or politically inept types or people with unusual child-care issues who remained on the "night production team," who were now completely overwhelmed by the big bulge in the snake's belly before deadline.
Meanwhile, some copy editors found that as part of the dayside team, they weren't supposed to ask the snarky, "this doesn't make any sense" questions copy editors ask. Their job was no longer to hold up a hand and say, "Before this goes into print, you've got to deal with this." Wasn't it better with everyone on the same wavelength? And there were more feet on the street -- or at least, the reduction in feet on the street wasn't as big as it might have been. And there was earnings growth.
I remember being in Kansas in the mid-1990s when the Wichita Eagle had blown up the copy desk. I was on vacation, but when I would say I worked for a newspaper, people could not shut up. They were so mad at the Wichita Eagle. Headlines were misspelled or wrong. Names of important people were wrong. Addresses were wrong. Stories ended in midair. Recipes lacked ingredients. Captions were wrong. Stories were illiterate. The few curmudgeons left at night were having to edit most of the paper while the day staff worked to craft the centerpiece. A paper that had been a source of pride to Wichita was now viewed by many in the community as quite the opposite. Apologies to anyone at the Eagle who remembers it differently; I admittedly wasn't there.
None of this blowing up the desks happened because we needed to publish electronically.
After enough years had passed, the Wichita Beacon re-established a copy desk. The rest of Knight Ridder also stopped blowing up copy desks; indeed, the company went 360 and started to strengthen them. The Maestro stopped conducting. Then came 2001, and then Help Wanted went on the long walkabout from which it will not return.
Now comes the Washington Post, whose managing editor says: It's time to put the safety net away. Jack Shafer notes: "He's confident that reduced editing won't necessarily sacrifice quality if it's done smartly. As an example, he points to the quality work done by reporters whose copy appears on the Post's Web site without the extensive editing and re-editing traditionally lavished on the print product. 'The more people who touch a story, the less authority and responsibility each take,' (Phil) Bennett says."
Further: "The plan also mandates 'fewer touches' on some stories by editors, which will elicit cheers from many Post reporters. They've long complained about 'drive-by editing' in which editors up and down the chain of command drop into their stories and fiddle with them to the point of destruction. According to the memo, a half-dozen editors routinely make changes on A-section stories, and an internal audit discovered one inside story that 12 different editors changed."
In praising the decision, Shafer notes the editing process at major magazines and compares it poorly to that of Slate: "I think it more than makes up for (the lack of magazine-style editing and copy editing) in timeliness with a Webby approach that gives maximum control to writers."
Clearly Shafer's sympathies do not lie with editors. Well, these are hard times and hard choices need to be made. But I suspect the managing editor of the Washington Post may drop into their stories and fiddle with them. I suspect the national and foreign editor will as well. A rim editor apparently won't.
Because, what were those changes by 12 different editors? Just fiddling with an adjective or making sure it was "Juan D. Peron"? Making a nicely written sentence worse because someone had a hangup about ending it with "to"? Or was it someone who was looking at the story and noticed that the date was wrong or that Dubai is not the capital of the UAE or Dmitri Medvedev was spelled Dimitri? Or even changing "most Luxembourgians" to "many Luxembourgians" unless the reporter had done a statistical poll of Luxembourg? We don't know. Statistics are hard to come by, although it seems clear that more and more...
Yeah, I know what Shafer means. I just spent almost an hour writing this and going over it five or six times. I like my voice too. But just for fun there are two common mistakes in it. They're ones that I made at first and then decided to leave in. Did you see them? They're in the same graph. Any one editor might catch them. Or not. And I suspect there are other errors that I simply missed.
I hope for the best for the Post. One does look for a way out of this meltdown, and with the global audience and reporting staff of the Post they operate in a different room than most of us do. But at the moment, I remain a lineman for the county, and I drive the main roads, searching in the sun for another overload.
It was back during the last giant U.S. economic collapse -- the one in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which many newspapers that had had a decade of unchecked stability or growth in staffing confronted for the first time the reality of investors: We don't care that your business is cyclical and tanked, they said. Give us growth in earnings every quarter. Newspapers had already reaped the savings from getting rid of the composing room. Now they had to cut elsewhere. They started looking at that notorious cost center, the newsroom, and that notorious cost center in the newsroom, the copy and news desks.
(Remember, this is before the Internet.)
Some newspapers just whittled here and there, but others devised what they saw as progressive and systematic responses. The copy desk no longer had the responsibility of feeding type in slugs to the Linotype operators, right? Why spend all that time on an assembly-line production system? Besides, we need feet on the street.
And so emerged ideas like the Maestro concept and "blowing up the copy desk," an exercise in which a number of Knight Ridder papers engaged.
The idea seemed good. Have a copy editor assigned to each section to work on the centerpieces and main stories during the day. They'd be part of the team, working with the reporter and editors and photographers. By working with them, they'd do the most justice to the story and photos. There wouldn't be late tinkering by some cantankerous copy editor bent on spoiling the flow of the story by changing all the "says"es to "said"s or arguing that "Although statistics are hard to come by, it seems apparent that more and more people..." isn't solid enough to state that something is true.
And by doing the editing earlier in the cycle, fewer people would be needed, because you wouldn't have the big bulge in the snake's belly before deadline.
(Remember, this is before the Internet.)
Well, most of us who were around then saw what happened. One of the biggest management problems you face on the copy desk is that the hours and days off suck. Lots of talented people don't want your jobs because they don't want to be at work at midnight on Friday. So a number of copy editors flew to these positions. Nothing bad about that. But they found that much of the day went into thinking about the centerpiece and an off-lede -- the only stories that were actually done during the day and the ones that the top editors would pay the most attention to. They found that they liked to pay the most attention to these stories as well.
The rest of the copy -- most of it -- fell on the curmudgeons or politically inept types or people with unusual child-care issues who remained on the "night production team," who were now completely overwhelmed by the big bulge in the snake's belly before deadline.
Meanwhile, some copy editors found that as part of the dayside team, they weren't supposed to ask the snarky, "this doesn't make any sense" questions copy editors ask. Their job was no longer to hold up a hand and say, "Before this goes into print, you've got to deal with this." Wasn't it better with everyone on the same wavelength? And there were more feet on the street -- or at least, the reduction in feet on the street wasn't as big as it might have been. And there was earnings growth.
I remember being in Kansas in the mid-1990s when the Wichita Eagle had blown up the copy desk. I was on vacation, but when I would say I worked for a newspaper, people could not shut up. They were so mad at the Wichita Eagle. Headlines were misspelled or wrong. Names of important people were wrong. Addresses were wrong. Stories ended in midair. Recipes lacked ingredients. Captions were wrong. Stories were illiterate. The few curmudgeons left at night were having to edit most of the paper while the day staff worked to craft the centerpiece. A paper that had been a source of pride to Wichita was now viewed by many in the community as quite the opposite. Apologies to anyone at the Eagle who remembers it differently; I admittedly wasn't there.
None of this blowing up the desks happened because we needed to publish electronically.
After enough years had passed, the Wichita Beacon re-established a copy desk. The rest of Knight Ridder also stopped blowing up copy desks; indeed, the company went 360 and started to strengthen them. The Maestro stopped conducting. Then came 2001, and then Help Wanted went on the long walkabout from which it will not return.
Now comes the Washington Post, whose managing editor says: It's time to put the safety net away. Jack Shafer notes: "He's confident that reduced editing won't necessarily sacrifice quality if it's done smartly. As an example, he points to the quality work done by reporters whose copy appears on the Post's Web site without the extensive editing and re-editing traditionally lavished on the print product. 'The more people who touch a story, the less authority and responsibility each take,' (Phil) Bennett says."
Further: "The plan also mandates 'fewer touches' on some stories by editors, which will elicit cheers from many Post reporters. They've long complained about 'drive-by editing' in which editors up and down the chain of command drop into their stories and fiddle with them to the point of destruction. According to the memo, a half-dozen editors routinely make changes on A-section stories, and an internal audit discovered one inside story that 12 different editors changed."
In praising the decision, Shafer notes the editing process at major magazines and compares it poorly to that of Slate: "I think it more than makes up for (the lack of magazine-style editing and copy editing) in timeliness with a Webby approach that gives maximum control to writers."
Clearly Shafer's sympathies do not lie with editors. Well, these are hard times and hard choices need to be made. But I suspect the managing editor of the Washington Post may drop into their stories and fiddle with them. I suspect the national and foreign editor will as well. A rim editor apparently won't.
Because, what were those changes by 12 different editors? Just fiddling with an adjective or making sure it was "Juan D. Peron"? Making a nicely written sentence worse because someone had a hangup about ending it with "to"? Or was it someone who was looking at the story and noticed that the date was wrong or that Dubai is not the capital of the UAE or Dmitri Medvedev was spelled Dimitri? Or even changing "most Luxembourgians" to "many Luxembourgians" unless the reporter had done a statistical poll of Luxembourg? We don't know. Statistics are hard to come by, although it seems clear that more and more...
Yeah, I know what Shafer means. I just spent almost an hour writing this and going over it five or six times. I like my voice too. But just for fun there are two common mistakes in it. They're ones that I made at first and then decided to leave in. Did you see them? They're in the same graph. Any one editor might catch them. Or not. And I suspect there are other errors that I simply missed.
I hope for the best for the Post. One does look for a way out of this meltdown, and with the global audience and reporting staff of the Post they operate in a different room than most of us do. But at the moment, I remain a lineman for the county, and I drive the main roads, searching in the sun for another overload.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Oh, Yeah, Copy Editing
So many vapid opinions of my own to offer, so much unlimited space, how will I get to them all.
But let's put the third leg on this particular stool. Newspapers, department stores, copy editing.
Manning Pynn, reader editor of the Orlando Sentinel, wrote: "Nothing, though, beats front-end quality control. Information that can't be trusted is not less useful; it is worthless."
(He wrote that recently, but not recently enough that it isn't behind the archive wall. I can see why a blogger wants everything to be free; I can't do a neat little link here. My convenience, however, is not the Orlando Sentinel's main concern and should not be.)
Among the products that newspapers offer is, as the Committee of Concerned Journalists puts it, verified information. You might not like the information and you might not even agree with whom we verified it with; but it was verified.
In response is offered the self-correcting nature of the Net and the desire of the online provider of information to be seen as useful and correct. Both arguments have a case, and both have flaws.
What is known, though, is that the reputation -- the brand -- of newspapers for journalism is based in large part upon the system by which they gather news; that that system involves copy going through copy editors; and that it has been, by and large, a very successful system.
So copy editors are not the equivalent of check processors, a back office function to be moved from Jersey City to India as quickly as possible. Copy editors are integral to defining the brand -- and thus the business -- of the newspaper. Indeed, copy editors are a vital part of the "core mission," to use that current cliche.
(Plus, we do really cool things like taking a photo of a mother pushing her daughter on a swing on a 70-degree day, with the next day's temperature predicted to be much lower, and writing for the caption: "A Swing in Temperatures.")
But let's put the third leg on this particular stool. Newspapers, department stores, copy editing.
Manning Pynn, reader editor of the Orlando Sentinel, wrote: "Nothing, though, beats front-end quality control. Information that can't be trusted is not less useful; it is worthless."
(He wrote that recently, but not recently enough that it isn't behind the archive wall. I can see why a blogger wants everything to be free; I can't do a neat little link here. My convenience, however, is not the Orlando Sentinel's main concern and should not be.)
Among the products that newspapers offer is, as the Committee of Concerned Journalists puts it, verified information. You might not like the information and you might not even agree with whom we verified it with; but it was verified.
In response is offered the self-correcting nature of the Net and the desire of the online provider of information to be seen as useful and correct. Both arguments have a case, and both have flaws.
What is known, though, is that the reputation -- the brand -- of newspapers for journalism is based in large part upon the system by which they gather news; that that system involves copy going through copy editors; and that it has been, by and large, a very successful system.
So copy editors are not the equivalent of check processors, a back office function to be moved from Jersey City to India as quickly as possible. Copy editors are integral to defining the brand -- and thus the business -- of the newspaper. Indeed, copy editors are a vital part of the "core mission," to use that current cliche.
(Plus, we do really cool things like taking a photo of a mother pushing her daughter on a swing on a 70-degree day, with the next day's temperature predicted to be much lower, and writing for the caption: "A Swing in Temperatures.")
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