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Combined editing center's head bust

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by lone star scribe, Oct 9, 2011.

  1. Frank_Ridgeway

    Frank_Ridgeway Well-Known Member

    Sorry, I have to disagree with that out of hand. I appreciate your point that mistakes happen regardless -- I've made my share. My first experience with remote editing was in 1980, just before the whole "cluster" thing took hold. More recently, I've been involved in adding a bunch of local things to my newspaper's upcoming stylebook update, and most of that is really arcane stuff that no outsider could ever possibly know or figure out by Googling, but our readers certainly would pick up on it if we got it wrong. In fact on some of them, if you did not live here, you would have to be some sort of supergenius to even know enough to look it up in the first place -- such as separate municipalities with the same name existing side by side. I live in one weird fucking state and nobody in Nebraska or Tennessee is going to understand even half of what we do here.
     
  2. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    Frank said it before I did. I appreciate the contrarian view -- that mistakes happen regardless of desk consolidation and editing centers, which is true -- but they'll happen more often, and be far less likely to be caught, if somebody editing the story knows nothing about where the story is happening.
     
  3. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    What do you do now with the "gotcha" call? "Yes sir, let me transfer you to our editing center five states away, they'll be happy to talk to you."
     
  4. beanpole

    beanpole Member

    Here's my point -- AP for years edited every national story out of New York. Editors there did a damned good job, and they didn't have to be in the same bureau where the reporter worked. Today, even the state-level copy is being edited in Philly, Atlanta, Phoenix and Chicago. It's being edited by talented editors who, 99 times out of 100, make the copy better.

    Metros across the country have reporters and editors working in different locations. Hell, you can't tell me that a NYT dispatch out of Egypt isn't being edited well because the person doing the line editing is in Paris or New York.

    I know those are extreme examples. But I think that editing centers can work if they're done right. You have to have a talented group of editors. You *must* have the home paper maintain editorial control, including deciding what story is going to go on what page and how it wants news played. You have to give editors a realistic workload.

    By all means, I would rather have a dedicated copy desk for every newsroom, and for a copy editor to be able to walk over to a reporter's desk rather than sending an instant message to the city desk of whatever paper he or she happens to be working on at that moment. That's when newspapers -- or any newsgathering organization -- runs best. I worry tremendously about companies that try to run consolidated editing centers as half-assed as I've seen a lot of newsrooms. I worry that the companies that will be the first to try consolidated editing will do such a bad job that they'll do lasting harm to the papers.

    But I still believe that a center with strong editors can do good work, given the opportunity. I just don't know if the Paxtons and Gannetts of the world will be able to do it.
     
  5. beanpole

    beanpole Member

    I think that a newspaper that is being produced at a consolidated editing center has to maintain editorial control. They have to have someone in the newsroom to decide what story they want to have one what page and how to handle late-breaking national or local news. So yeah, the newspaper is still going to get a phone call from the public complaining about a bad head or a missed jumpline. And reporters will bitch about taking those calls just like they always have. ;)
     
  6. Tarheel316

    Tarheel316 Well-Known Member

    Yeah, really.
     
  7. Frank_Ridgeway

    Frank_Ridgeway Well-Known Member

    Apples, oranges. If the dispatch out of Cairo or Cleveland is botched in New York for a paper in Richmond, not many people in any of the cities are going to know. The people in Cairo, Cleveland and New York usually don't read the Virginia paper, and few Richmond readers know Cairo and Cleveland very well. If the dispatch out of Richmond is botched by editors in New York for the Richmond paper, then you have a problem, which is what we're discussing here.
     
  8. beanpole

    beanpole Member

    I agree that the biggest hurdle for centers is the local geography. How would a copy editor know that 21st Street should be 21st Avenue, or that the Olive Garden that burned down is on 23rd Street, not 32nd Street? Editing centers can always Google addresses to fact-check, but there's going to be more pressure on the city/metro desks at local newspapers to do decent first edits that catch those errors.

    At the same time, the biggest hurdle for many small papers is keeping talented copy editors -- either because the publisher hacks the newsroom so much that they get laid off, or because anyone with serious editing talent migrates to a larger paper or out of the industry. I would bet there's plenty of papers out there with circulations 10K or less that would get better copyediting from an editing center than they currently get from their solitary copy editor/page designer/web producer. That's why I think that a group of talented editors in a centralized location can work in some situations.
     
  9. SportsGuyBCK

    SportsGuyBCK Active Member

    Unfortunately, most of these operations aren't hiring talented copy editors -- they're getting whoever they can get for what little they're paying, and paying a price because of constant turnover because of that and the workload ...
     
  10. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    Editing national stories is one thing. Editing a high school football roundup or a government meeting story about a town of 347 is another.

    Even if the errors are mostly caught, the editing itself will suffer.
     
  11. BillyT

    BillyT Active Member

    My favorite story has to do with out-of-state editors being transferred to the Hartford Courant when it was sold years ago.

    Seems the editor spiked a story about Long Island Sound (the body of water all of Conencticut's shoreline is on), because "We don't cover New York."
     
  12. Drip

    Drip Active Member

    Frank is right. However, I'd like to add that SOMEONE is supposed to proof those pages. That, to me, is where the mistake is being made. They aren't doing the job.
     
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