If you're a copy editor, this is a painful read

Copy editors are great to have. They can make my writing better and catch mistakes if I make them.

But they are not essential. They ensure quality. If you can't afford quality, you get something cheaper.

Take buying a car for an example.

I'd love to have a car with every available option, but I can't afford it. Instead, I bought a basic model, because I need to get around.

The basic model gets me places. It may not be as stylish, as safe or as fast, but I still get there. Should I have the model with every option? Sure. Want to buy it for me?

 

If you think copy editors are "not essential," as most on this thread seem to, I don't want to hear anyone bitch any more about management being cheap or cutting too much.

By saying editors are a luxury to be sacrificed when money is tight, you are defending cheap management and its vision of journalism's future.

 

Fixed. I've known few writers over the year that didn't have mistakes of some kind -- sometimes spelling, style and grammar, sometimes factual errors or libel -- at least once a week or more. Esp. sports writers. And these are some great writers, but the deadlines of sports writing make it impossible to be clean a lot of the time.

 

And, no one is saying you need an editor because your writing sucks. Most writers are way better than me - that's why I was much better on the editing side.

But, to think everything you write is perfect is dangerously delusional and WILL come back to bite you at some point.

 

So does thinking none of your writers could self-edit better than you edited them.

It's clear given your posts that this is personal to you. I get that. But in the online journalism world, it's a fair argument to say that copy editors aren't worth it. You can decry how this is bad for the industry as a whole, but readers are willing to accept some grammar errors if the important news is all there.

The Gawkers, Buzzfeeds and Business Insiders of the world can't afford to have a copy editor meticulously review every article before it gets published. Social media apps like Twitter have increased the stakes of being first and that puts more of an emphasis on good reporters and less of one on copy editors. It's no surprise that when newsroom layoffs happen, copy editors are typically the first ones to be targeted. I'm not saying copy editors don't have their value -- plenty have saved me on stories -- but the market has dictated that reporters that break news/produce a lot of posts are currently more valuable. It makes more sense for a tech website to just load up on cheap, young talent to produce dozens of blog posts a day than a copy editor.

 

I'm concerned with your reading comprehension if that was your takeaway from my last post.

 

That wasn't in response to anything. Just a general point.

And, JCT, it's not personal to me. I'm not in the business anymore. I could give two fucks what any of you do. Just as I'm sure none of you will lose sleep over what I think.

 

If correcting every factual error is the standard by which copy editors are judged, I have never worked with good copy editors in the past 15 years.

Guess what? I've screwed up athletes' names and school nicknames too, and the copy editors haven't corrected them -- because those are facts they do not know. I would not expect them to know many of those facts either, even when the desk was on site and fully staffed.

I have had to be pretty darn close to perfect throughout my career. But to me, getting the facts right is the reporter's job. Reporters' inability to do that shocked me as a fact-checking intern for a major regional magazine. At a newspaper, the sort of time to verify each detail just doesn't exist -- particularly when getting the story online quickly makes a big difference.

 

Copy editors aren't supposed to know every fact. They're supposed to verify every fact. Even still, before the decimation of anything resembling institutional knowledge, many DID know most of the facts, brought about by repeated verification.

Getting facts right is everyone's job. But we all operate under constraints - reporters with time, editors with being physically removed from the situation, etc.

We should work as a team, but I know that'll never happen. And, being out of the business, I don't need to pretend anymore that reporters and editors will ever get along.

 

I wish I had your former newsroom's deadlines to be able to verify facts the same way for a daily newspaper that I did at a weekly magazine. Seriously, how would you go about doing that for, say, a high school track meet with hundreds of names, events and results? I'd appreciate suggestions I can pass along to the guys on the desk, because they don't know very much about certain sports -- and I wouldn't expect them to recognize the athletes and schools which aren't relevant to where they sit.

I'm nominally a reporter, but I still edit copy daily. I can verify names only because I have preseason paperwork for almost all our local teams. But if the reporter gets the score wrong, or says somebody sank a 3-pointer when it was actually her teammate? I have no way to check that out -- or even know it wasn't correct in the first place.

 

The internet.

 

You answered your own question on verifying names. Don't you think copy editors also want to have "paperwork for almost all our local teams?"

First thing I did as a reporter was make copies of every roster for every sport and give them to the copy editors.

First thing I did as a copy editor was to ask every reporter for a copy of every roster for every sport so I'd have them as a reference.

Not much anyone can do if the coach or AD misspells a name on a roster or the reporter writes down the wrong score.

But the old argument that "we can't catch every mistake so we shouldn't try to catch any" is bullshit. We catch as much as we can, and among all of us, we can make it to near perfect. In an ideal world, that is. I know such teamwork is impossible.