Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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The copy desk
To be useful, information will always need to be digested,
whether the future of media lies online, in print or somewhere else
This was adapted from a speech Connolly gave to the American Copy
Editors Society in October.
Forests are felled these days and rivers of ink are consumed in discussing
the glamour and glitz of the "new media" — the Web, the Net, CD-ROMs and
all things digital. Most editors probably work for some entity that has
established a Web site in recent years.
Surely, this does not bode well for newspapers. And what does not bode
well for newspapers clearly does not bode well for editors.
It’s small wonder that publishers are in a sweat, given what they’ve
been reading about the newspaper business. Circulation has been dropping.
Young people are not reading the way their elders did. Our traditional
advertisers are disappearing. These are not happy tidings for newspapers,
and so, obviously, they’re not happy for copy editors.
Time magazine recently mentioned that it no longer rates the 10 best
newspapers in America because so many of the best have "gone downhill."
It cited in that connection such bastions of quality as The Wall Street
Journal and The Washington Post. Then it took a barrel-house swipe at The
Miami Herald and The Detroit Free Press.
Now, if you can’t aspire to (and believe in) The Wall Street Journal
and The Washington Post, it’s a sorry time for newspapers. If you can’t
map out a career that includes a stop at The Miami Herald or The Detroit
Free Press, then the newspaper business has fallen on difficult times indeed.
Add to all that dire news the mayhem that Mark Willes has been creating
at the Los Angeles Times, and it’s easy to conclude that newspapers are
doomed to the fate of the green eyeshade and the spittoon. All of us, in
this view, will soon be going door-to-door selling America Online memberships.
It’s a sorry time, a strange and scary time, to be an editor — a terrible
time to be an editor, right?
Well, no.
Whatever happens to newspapers, in my view, it’s a great time to be
an editor. It may be the best time in history if you’re a good editor —
if you’re intelligent and thoughtful and creative and adaptable.
Now, I am far from an expert on economics, finance or marketing. I have
spent my life over pastepots and editing terminals, not spreadsheets and
stock tables. I don’t know finance, but I do know human nature. And that
knowledge leads me to believe that there will be newspapers as long as
I live and that they’ll probably be around as long as you live.
There may not be as many newspapers in your dotage as there are in mine.
They may not be the same newspapers. They may not look like those of the
1990s. But I’m quite sure that there will be newspapers, and people will
read them and advertise in them.
Remember when you’re feeling morose that computers are hardly the first
threat to this business. Radio didn’t kill it despite dire warnings. Movies
— even talking pictures and newsreels — didn’t kill it. Magazines didn’t
make it obsolete, and television didn’t, either, though everybody knew
in the 1950s that newspapers were all but finished.
In the face of those assaults, newspapers adapted. They’re far better
today more thoughtful and balanced and fair, more attractive and readable
— than they were when your grandparents huddled in front of that old radio.
Newspapers adapted then, and they’ll adapt now.
But let’s suppose — difficult as it may be to imagine — that I’m wrong!
Let’s suppose that newspapers fail to adapt, that they disappear tomorrow,
utterly and completely. Even if that happens, it seems to me, it will still
be a great time to be an editor.
A respected publisher said once that just because news organizations
fail to adapt in these tumultuous times does not mean that journalists
will fail to adapt.
We editors will adapt, even if our employers don’t. Whatever publishers
do, it will be a great time for copy editors.
It will be a great time for copy editors because in our society, for
whatever reason, engineers have always been more prolific than poets. Our
collective ability to deliver information far outstrips our ability to
create it and package it, to make it understandable and useful and entertaining
... to do, in other words, what copy editors do.
What does it say about society that we have a weather channel, a golf
channel and a Home Shopping Network but no channels devoted to great art
or great theater or great music, to great ideas? It says that we are better
at training engineers than we are at inspiring intellects and artists.
Surf the Web and you’ll see that demonstrated more forcefully. In cyberspace
there are not 50 channels but thousands — more than any mortal mind can
comprehend. The Internet is a deluge of ill-formed opinion and undigested
data. What it needs is not more data but more digestion, more sense, more
judgment and intelligence. What the Internet needs is competent, thinking
copy editors.
And as the need for useful, understandable information grows, which
is inevitable, copy editors will be ever more in demand. They will be in
demand if they’re smart and quick and they focus on the business of editors,
not the business of engineers or publishers or entrepreneurs.
These times present newspaper people with five great unknowns, it seems
to me.
Technological issues
How will information be delivered to the consumer? Will it be with ink
on paper? Over wires? Through the air or cyberspace? Newspaper and magazine
columns are chockablock with speculation on such matters, and properly
so. These are serious questions, and their answers will have immense consequences.
But they are, strictly speaking, questions for engineers and circulators,
not questions for copy editors. They are the equivalent of whether to buy
or lease the trucks. They are interesting, certainly. They are worth writing
about now and then, but they are not of immediate professional concern
to us.
Economic issues
Who will profit from the new information-delivery ventures that are
springing up around us? Who will pay for them? Will the telephone companies
or the cable operators muscle aside the traditional print publishers? Will
Microsoft eat everybody’s lunch? Fortunes will be made and lost as we discover
the answers to those questions. Entire industries will be created and wiped
out. They are important questions.
But they are, ultimately, questions for boards of directors and publishers,
for entrepreneurs and investors. They are the equivalent of questions about
whether to invest in a new press or move the office to the edge of town.
They are not, strictly speaking, questions for copy editors.
Legal issues
Will reporters, photographers and artists retain the same rights to
their work? What will the Internet do to freedom of speech, to copyright
law or child-pornography laws? How will we ensure our privacy when — in
theory, at least — someone will be capable of monitoring every keystroke?
These are important subjects for lawyers and courts and consumer advocates
to struggle with, matters for all of us to struggle with as citizens. They
will keep the American Civil Liberties Union busy (and your outside counsel
flush with fees) for years. But they are questions for the legal department
and the publisher. They are not in anything but an academic or journalistic
sense challenges for copy editors.
Access and diversity
In mandating that life will be lived online, are we creating a great
new class of have-nots of all those who lack the wherewithal to buy a Pentium
II computer and a lightning-fast modem? Are minority groups being bypassed
in this revolution as they were when the printing press and radio and television
first loomed on the horizon?
Many minorities fear with some reason that they will once again be spectators
at a white man’s game. They and advocates for the poor have every right
to be concerned. But theirs are social questions, not editing questions.
Content
Finally, there is the issue of content, and this is where we copy editors
should focus, for content is the business of copy editors. Those of us
who hone our traditional skills — who get better at developing and presenting
content — have nothing to worry about (at least professionally) as the
world around us spins toward we know not what.
The machinery and buttons we use will change, of course. But that’s
incidental. The key has never been those buttons. The key is learning which
questions to ask and how to ask them. Learning to see the world, to understand
it and explain it. That’s editing.
Learn to do those things well — really, really well — and you’ll never
want for work, no matter what Microsoft dreams up, no matter what happens
to the Internet.
Things are lookin’ pretty good these days for us ink-stained wretches
on the rim.
Connolly is a senior editor for The New York Times.
