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The lowly copy editor

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by SF_Express, Feb 16, 2012.

  1. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  2. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    I'm a ":" guy.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 1, 2015
  3. Mystery Meat II

    Mystery Meat II Well-Known Member

    I've known a lot of :s in my newspapering days.
     
  4. jr/shotglass

    jr/shotglass Well-Known Member

    I guess my question is, where does page designer fit in all this?

    The newspapers that can afford design "specialists" -- people who design, don't edit -- are truly in the minority.

    The places where they "lay out" pages -- which reads like throwing everything toward a page and hope it falls in the right order -- seems to be getting most of the lip service.

    My title is copy editor. But I know damn well that if I didn't take page design seriously, try to go the extra mile on that, I'd hear about it in a hurry. And I should.

    (Sorry, Dye, wherever you are. ;))
     
  5. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    That was basically the point I was trying to make. This world where copy editors only worry about typos and not actually putting out a paper is an unknown one to me.
     
  6. J-School Blue

    J-School Blue Member

    This. This guy plainly has no idea how a copy desk actually functions or how a newspaper is put together. The "laying out" in little quotes, like it wasn't an all-consuming job that the paper wouldn't exist without, brings that home. As does, sadly, the line about guys working at the same paper for 40+ years. Not to mention, the copy editors I've worked with generally had primary responsibility for getting stories online post-editing (unless it was a breaking clusterf*ck the reporter had to frantically post themselves, and then they'd get to update it to fix the many errors).
     
  7. jr/shotglass

    jr/shotglass Well-Known Member

    I removed the "I'm in my 32nd," because I didn't want it to sound like bragging. It's not. It's just the way things panned out.
     
  8. bigpern23

    bigpern23 Well-Known Member

    Beat me to it, so I'll go with this one:

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  9. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  10. jr/shotglass

    jr/shotglass Well-Known Member

    To be honest, this entire passage made my blood boil a little bit.

    Why don't you just equate page design with garbage collection and be done with it? I didn't really know that it was a job people run away from ...
     
  11. Biscayne

    Biscayne Guest

    Fixed. :)
     
  12. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    That is literally my biggest thing, Biscayne. I always split that shit. I just read it better that way, so it never jumps out at me. "would never worry" sounds better to me than "never would worry."

    I miss probably 90 percent of those that come to me. Thankfully, most of our writers never even try for those.
     
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