Last Updated: March 23, 1999
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On copy editing
Readers rank little errors — grammar, spelling, etc.
— as their first credibility roadblock; copy editors say it’s no mystery:
errors increase as their workload does
The ASNE credibility report, with its No. 1 finding that errors in precision
are undermining the credibility of our newspapers, lends a sense of urgency
to the idea that editors should be paying more attention to how technology
has diminished their copy desks’ effectiveness.
Pam Robinson, president of the American Copy Editors Society, said technology
itself is not the problem. “I doubt if anyone in ACES would like to go
back to the days of hot type because the technology has given us more control
over the whole process,” she said. “What we hear from our members, from
managers to rim editors, is that the technology has, in some places, brought
more work — more emphasis on production at the expense of editing.” She
said that, to save money, copy editors at some papers are coding stories
for the Web site or the library files in addition to coding them for producing
the newspaper.
She said copy editors and senior editors should be looking honestly
at what the copy desk is doing now at their papers. She suggested they
“figure out how much is not editing, and then decide how important they
consider the traditional role of the copy desk, which is to protect the
newspaper’s good name.”
Other copy desk experts identified technology, or its ramifications,
as the biggest reason for the prevalence of error. Like Robinson, they
noted a sense of irony. Technology should be improving the quality of our
newspapers, because it gives the editors more control over the final pages
than they had in the days before computerized typesetting, area composition
and pagination.
While eliminating printers’ and compositors’ jobs, technology did not
eliminate all their work. As those workers retired or took buyouts,
the remaining production tasks — entering composition codes, assembling
pages on the computer screen — were taken over by copy editors. At a few
newspapers, farsighted editors and publishers increased staffing on the
copy desks to compensate. More often, the copy desks did not grow. To the
contrary, in the economic squeeze of the last decade, their staffing declined
as their workload increased.
Many of the authorities on copy editing I asked concluded that under
those circumstances, it was only logical that customers would see more
typos, misspellings and tortured syntax.
“For various reasons, many newspapers have not been putting as much
resources into quality control, and we are beginning to see the cost of
it,” said Carl Sessions Stepp, who teaches journalism at the University
of Maryland and visits dozens of newsrooms each year as a consultant. “No
one should be surprised that we are getting more little errors in the paper.
We are getting big ones, too.”
Stepp said that at many of the newspapers he has visited, he has observed
two phenomena on the copy desks. One is that copy editors are spending
less of their total time on editing; the rest is devoted to technical functions
like formatting, coding and pagination. The other is that copy editors
are spending less time on each piece of copy. “Where they might have spent
20 to 30 minutes, they now devote 10 to 15,” Stepp said.
John Russial, a former copy chief who now teaches at the University
of Oregon, said the business had not come to terms with increased production
work in the newsroom. He said technical tasks distract copy editors from
editing. Copy chiefs, Russial said, are tracking page elements instead
of checking copy and improving headlines.
“What gets shorted because of technology is the detail level of editing
and the quality of headlines,” said Russial, who wrote his doctoral thesis
on the effects of pagination on the copy desk.
Alex Cruden, chief editor of the copy desks at the Detroit Free Press,
agreed that copy editors were distracted by production duties. “No matter
how talented editors may be, if they have more things to do, they’ll make
more mistakes,” he said.
Cruden and Stepp also noted the increase in zoning as newspapers strive
to reach more readers. “I agree that local news is the franchise and zoning
is a good thing,” Stepp said. The copy desk may have grown as a result
of zoning, he said, “but not nearly commensurate to the extra work.” Cruden
saw another hazard: “If you use the same story across several zones, but
change it a little each time and the same copy editor edits that story
different times during the night, the editor may not read it as keenly
because it is repetitive.”
The credibility report should also be taken seriously by journalists
who tend to dismiss precision, in the language and in minor facts, as inconsequential.
If anything, it demonstrates that the readers do care about grammar, punctuation
and spelling — the nits, in newsroom parlance. Stepp said the study shows
that readers make big decisions about newspapers based on little things;
they are, after all, the same consumers who decide to buy a car by listening
to how the door slams instead of looking at the engine. The study, Stepp
said, “puts a big exclamation point on the adage that there is no such
thing as a small error.”
Foreman, a longtime editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, is now a
distinguished professional-in-residence at the Penn State College of Communications.
