Remember when we used to have newspapers?

What's the absolute minimum number of people required to copy edit a daily newspaper?

One way to find out, it seems, is to conduct an experiment. Take a functional copy desk and subtract 20 percent of its staff. Look at that -- they still managed to somehow get everything read and onto the page. With headlines even.

OK, then, try again. Let's eliminate another 20 percent and toss in some rolling furloughs so that the full complement of remaining personnel is never all there at once. Wow -- they still managed to do the job, more or less. Sure there's a noticeable decline in the quality and attention given to the product, but the quality isn't yet declining in a one-to-one ratio with the reduction in staff. And no marked increase in the cost of litigation for libel. Not quite yet, anyway.

So this week the nation's largest newspaper chain pushed its experiment even further. We lost another 25 percent of the remaining skeleton crew on our copy desk yesterday. Good people who were good at their jobs who are now looking for new careers.

This morning our readers received several pages of newsprint covered with words and pictures. It's possible that many of those words were accurate, but I really can't say for sure. ([Woody] I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. I think it involves Russia. [/Woody])

The experiment, it seems to me, has reached its conclusion. We now can say, with some confidence, how many copy editors is not enough.

One unintended, but predictable, outcome of this experiment will likely be that some of our remaining readers won't be delighted to learn that they are the first human being -- ever -- to read some of the sentences put before them and they may, in turn, decide to join the ever-growing fellowship of former newspaper readers. The ensuing decline in readership will, again in turn, suggest to some that there ought to be an additional corresponding reduction in the number of copy editors. Repeat as necessary until finished -- it shouldn't be too long.

So it's a frenetic end to a stressful week and what with the extra hours and the survivor's guilt and the frustrated rage that arises from watching good craftsmenpeople and good craft smanship suffer and from seeing the public trust run aground due to the reckless quarterly myopia of irresponsible bean-counters -- what with all that, I'm afraid I haven't time today to give Bruce Barnes' sermon the full attention its peculiar awfulness merits. So this week's LBFriday installment will be somewhat abbreviated, but it should be posted shortly.

Comments

[Michael Mock]

Blech. I hope things look up soon... though for the life of me, I can't imagine how, given the dynamic you just described.

[NewsCat]

Aw Fred, I'm really sorry. I was a terrible first-draft reporter. I shutter to think what kind of english would appear in my papers had I not been copy-edited. Simple typos, sentences that made no sense, etc. My brain moves faster than my fingers I think. To this day I have friends tell me that some of my emails don't resemble english.

[Amaryllis]

in haste-- read it and weep.

"The front of Tuesday's Metro section directed readers to turn to Page B3 for a story about the suspected kidnapping of a Wheaton woman. But no story could be found. The previous day, a key passage in a Metro feature about gay and lesbian families living in the suburbs ended in mid-sentence, leaving readers hanging...Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter was described as a "ferocious" (instead of voracious) reader. A photo caption mistakenly referred to a boy with the odd first name of "Jacon" instead of "Jacob" (clue: "b" is next to "n" on the keyboard)."

"patience and understanding," my left behind.

[Ian]

If a paper wanted to keep its reputation, they could start publishing corrections for every paper in town. I like the idea that doing the job properly on a regular basis could come to be seen as a selling point.

It'd even be cheap -- there are lots of people in the general public who would love to point out ridiculous mistakes for free. Run a blog/wiki and publish the results in the next day's paper.

[steward]

Wow.

If newspapers weren't (even with massive staff cuts) still miles better than cable news, I would give up completely.

"If readers can't rely on our accuracy, why should they even pick up the paper?" asked Chris Wienandt, an editor at the Dallas Morning News and president of the American Copy Editors Society, which has roughly 600 members.

Why? Well, typo-ridden NEWS is better than pointless nattering.

[Tricksterson]

Yes, newspapers just don't seem to get it. As an example The Boston Globe recently raised it's price from 50 cents to a dollar. Guess who no longer buys it?

[Not Really Here]

So, I'm guessing that it won't be too long before people start lining their birdcages and catboxes without first observing the formality of reading the newspaper?

Geez. This really sucks.

[mcc]

So there's this story about a man who was training his horse to eat sawdust...

[Ursula L]

Doesn't it every occur to anyone that if you're having trouble selling your product, it may be an easier sell if you make the product better?

[David]

That's hard, though.

[Selcaby]

I'm sorry things are so awful, and wish I could help. Talk about a vicious cycle.

Talking of inadequate editing, I'm reading a book of literary criticism, which I will not name because it's too late to change anything and I don't want to embarrass the author, which is a good book marred by a number of silly mistakes. Yesterday I found a part that said that from 1973 to 2003 was twenty years. Later in the same chapter it says that from 1987 to 2003 was more than twenty years. It also gets characters' names wrong, such as "John" for Jon and "Elaine" for Ellen, even when quoting things the characters say that have their names right next to them in the source text. The weird thing is that the mistakes with names are absolutely consistent. I don't know whether the author can really have misread them - how, while reading the source text so obviously carefully? - or whether some misguided editor has "corrected" them.

[Ursula L]

That's hard, though.

True.

I blame the MBA. When you have the idea that you can manage any business, provided you know how to manage you wind up not knowing enough about your business to actually manage it in a way that you're producing a good product and selling the product based on drawing people to the product's admirable qualities.

Not knowing the product, you can only change the business by cutting, because you've no concept on how it can grow.

[Naked Bunny with a Whip]

if you're having trouble selling your product, it may be an easier sell if you make the product better

Commie.

[Meg Spencer]

I am sorry to read about this kind of thing. Personally I've all but given up on newspapers (well, I get my news from blogs and Newsweek, so I suppose as a paying subscriber I HAVE given up). It's a shame, but over and over the people running newspapers have made decisions that just don't make sense. It's like they don't WANT to survive. The most recent nonsense about changing copyright law to limit linking online just blows my mind.

[Caroll]

Wow that sucks. You ought to get out now while you still can.

[Meg Spencer]

"Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter was described as a "ferocious" (instead of voracious) reader"

This is, however, an amusing typo. I mean, we've all heard the phrase "they devoured a book," this just takes it to the logical next step.

[Anton Mates]

some of our remaining readers won't be delighted to learn that they are the first human being -- ever -- to read some of the sentences put before them

Damn. Doesn't that imply that the writer of those sentences is either a computer program or a monkey? I mean, from your description of your company's philosophy, either is plausible...

[Keith]

Reminds me of this story from back in April, of the edition of the Brigham Young Student Newspaper that was pulled because of a caption that referred to the “Quorum of Twelve Apostates.”

It makes me chuckle, since I've spent the last few months hunting typos in 80K word manuscript, only to get the proof copy back and discover I still missed a few.

[Keith]

That would be typos in an 80K word manuscript. It never ends.

[Caravelle]

Selcaby : It also gets characters' names wrong, such as "John" for Jon and "Elaine" for Ellen, even when quoting things the characters say that have their names right next to them in the source text. The weird thing is that the mistakes with names are absolutely consistent. I don't know whether the author can really have misread them - how, while reading the source text so obviously carefully? - or whether some misguided editor has "corrected" them.

Maybe they changed the names at some point and missed a few ?
Anyway, McCaffrey's Dragonsquest had tons of names switched around for no reason since the previous book but I enjoyed it anyway (yeah, yeah, I know it has problems... I haven't read it in years so I might even like it less if I did. Whatever). It is certainly better to be consistent, and you certainly don't want to mar a passable book with that kind of mistake, but it isn't the kiss of death either.

Meg Spencer : It's a shame, but over and over the people running newspapers have made decisions that just don't make sense. It's like they don't WANT to survive. The most recent nonsense about changing copyright law to limit linking online just blows my mind.

Like Ursula says, I think it's more understandable if you assume the people owning and managing the newspapers know nothing about newspapers. And don't care.
It comes back to what Fred talked about before, how shareholders have come to expect enormous returns from newspapers that are completely inconsistent with the business model. (or rather, to get enormous returns they've been using a business model that's inconsistent with the product).

[Judith Victorious]

Some of us copy editors are women.

[Selcaby]

Caravelle:

Maybe they changed the names at some point and missed a few ?

The book I'm reading is nonfiction that quotes fiction. The names in the novels have not changed. I think I'm chalking it up to the peculiar blind spots I know some people have with dates or names or numbers. But I still think an editor should have caught it.

[Liz]

I heard about the layoffs from a friend who also works on your copy desk (D. from ACES) -- it didn't sound like you were among the unlucky ones, but I'm glad to hear you made it through this round intact. The whole thing sucks, though.

We don't even proofread pages with wire copy anymore. It's one of the many, many things to fall by the wayside. Our desk has been cut by more than half since January.

[Caravelle]

Selcaby : Oh wait, I hadn't understood your post. Well, I had but for some reason by the time I got to the end I'd forgotten the "literary criticism" bit at the beginning. Forget I said anything.

Judith Victorious : Some of us copy editors are women.

Did someone say you weren't ?
The only reference to copy editors' gender I could find is "craftsmen", which might warrant an argument about gender and language but no need to be snide about it.

[car]

I'm so sorry. I have to admit I'm selfishly glad you made it through this cut, but I know the feeling of how weird it is when you stay on and your friends get cut. I've also noticed a decline in editing in stories; not so much the technical details, but in just plain getting things wrong, or so superficial you might as well have not read it. I fear for the future of investigative reporting. I know you don't need permission from us, but take as long as you need. You've had a pretty rough summer.

[Sherri]

I've been reading newspapers daily since I was 7 years old, but other than nostalgia, I'm not sure why I keep subscribing to the local paper (Seattle Times). In just the six years I've lived here and subscribed, it's gone substancially downhill, even after the competition went away. The front section typically has two locally-written stories, and the rest are NYTimes, AP, or McClatchy, most of which I've already read the day before online. All of the other sections have gotten a lot smaller, sometimes half the size they were before.

I still think there's a place for a good local newspaper, but reprinting stale NYTimes articles doesn't make for a good local newspaper.

[Cowboy Diva]

Some of us copy editors are women.

....no need to be snide about it.

Caravelle, please point out where this is snide. Just the mention itself, or something else?

[Caravelle]

Cowboy Diva : Caravelle, please point out where this is snide. Just the mention itself, or something else?

I might be getting "snide" wrong, but the implication that we didn't realize that some copy editors are women. As I said the only place I saw that associated gender with copy editors was the use of "craftsmen", which, really... it's a word. Except for the "men" part it is well adapted to the context, and "craftspeople" would be awkward. So I'm fine with arguing that the word shouldn't have been used despite this, but in that case say that. I don't think a wholesale "women are people too !" is appropriate here.

[truth is life]

After reading the local paper and my school's paper, I've often thought that the one thing the world desperately needs more of is good editors. To reduce the number of editors at a newspaper...it's like cutting back on the number of waiters at a restaurant. Sure, you might save some money in the short run, but the service gets worse. Cut back enough...and who wants to go there anymore?

[Jill Smith]

Scared, smart, motivated people can kick out a lot of work for a short period of time. It's called a sprint. So when those initial cuts are made, and those remaining smart people are motivated and frightened, they are capable of a surprising amount. It may even work for a second round of cuts. But eventually, people get exhausted and overloaded and numb. And then it doesn't matter how smart or scared or motivated anyone is.

I'm so sorry. This truly sucks.

[Leum]

Yes, newspapers just don't seem to get it. As an example The Boston Globe recently raised it's price from 50 cents to a dollar. Guess who no longer buys it?

The Anchorage Daily News is embarking on a similar experiment. They're trying to find out just how low they can put the quality and just how high they can put the price before going out of business. Someone needs to point out to them that such an experiment requires multiple combinations of these features, and that it would be really nice if they kept one paper as a control group. Plz?

[Dash]

I don't think a wholesale "women are people too !" is appropriate here.

I'm guessing that Judith Victorious probably doesn't think so either, since that's not in fact what she said.

[thirstygirl]

Oh yeah, I've been there before in workplaces- let's just keep chopping bits off and see how far we get before the patient bleeds to death WHILE insisting that they also dance for our amusement...

My commiserations. Truly.

[Rebecca]

I once put together an issue of the school paper singlehandedly, because everyone else on staff lacked either the time or the dedication to come in during AP week. This was hours and hours a day opyediting, laying out, and writing filler, on top of the regular school day. And this was a monthly paper. I can't imagine that kind of staff cut on a daily.

[Rebecca]

*copyediting. Oh the irony.

[Dash]

Excellent post, as always. Notice how they never get rid of 20 percent of the board of directors, or 20 percent of the CEO's staff?

[Brett]

Sorry to hear it. I blame it on the fact that newspapers often don't own themselves anymore - they are usually part of larger conglomerates, who only see them as a source of profit, loss, and something to unload debt, and thus often drive towards cutting costs at the expense of quality.

As for the "Craftsmen" thing, keep in mind that it derives from Old English, where the "-men" suffix was actually gender-neutral.

[Leum]

Brett, doesn't matter. In Modern English, "craftsman," like "fireman," "policeman," and "Batman" carries a connotation of exclusive masculinity. Etymology does not determine denotative definition, let alone connotative; when a gender-neutral term exists, it is to be preferred. For more information, see this.

[Baxil]

I wish I had some better words of encouragement, but as a refugee from the newspaper industry who switched careers in 2006, I've seen the question "How many copy editors is enough?" answered quite pessimistically. In our case -- at a chain's main office that put out a ~10K circulation daily and another 15K worth of weeklies -- "Zero."

Work flow after a story was written was generally: Desk editor, managing editor, paginator. AP stories were only ever seen by the paginator. On a typical night, the front-page headlines were only ever checked by a single person (the paginator who wrote them!) before going onto the press or the web.

I paginated for about five years there -- fortunately, I arrived with 5+ years of copy editing experience under my belt, and the other paginator had been doing similar work all her life. If either of us had been poor at our unlisted job duties, heaven knows what sort of trouble the paper could have gotten into. It was already scary enough taking over that sort of responsibility, single-handedly, on a daily basis.

If newspapers' trends don't reverse, I think that's going to be the end result for papers both large and small: nobody's job is quality control, because it's something that's entirely offloaded onto people who already have other tasks to perform. It's shortsighted to the point of borderline criminal, but it's "efficient". Way to go, capitalism.

We can only hope newspapers start getting taken over by people who actually care about them.

[Bugmaster]

Brett, doesn't matter. In Modern English, "craftsman," like "fireman," "policeman," and "Batman" carries a connotation of exclusive masculinity.

One of these things is not like the other; "Batman" (with the capital B) refers not to a profession, but to a specific fictional character, who happens to be a male human (but, ironically, not a bat).

As for Hofstadter's essay... I think that, in this case, he ends up disproving his own point (hey, even he can't win all the time). The essay sounds awkward, unwieldy, and stilted. Hofstadter says, in the end "Perhaps this piece shocks you"; but all it does is make me shrug.

Hofstadter sort of admits it in the end: "I know of no human being who speaks Nonsexist as their native tongue"; but that's only because he associates non-sexism solely with gender-neutral pronouns and suffixes. He's right; very few people actually speak like that. The rest of us, though, have been speaking Nonsexist for quite some time now. When I personally hear "craftsman", I interpret it as something much closer to "artisan" than to "a male person who plies a craft" (and the same goes for "policeman", "fireman", etc.). Our language has been transformed over the years, just as our attitudes have been.

That said, though, I haven't read the source material that he is parodying, so it's possible I'm missing something.

[Caravelle]

Dash : I'm guessing that Judith Victorious probably doesn't think so either, since that's not in fact what she said.

Ah, hyperbole. "Women can be copy editors too !" then. You know, addressing a level of sexism and/or cluelessness that is an order of magnitude higher than what's in evidence.

[Lila]

Ursula: Doesn't it every occur to anyone that if you're having trouble selling your product, it may be an easier sell if you make the product better?

Not to GM, apparently. They're trumpeting about how they're going to start selling cars that people want (isn't that how they got into this mess?). Meanwhile, Toyota continues its mind-blowingly innovative practice of BUILDING GOOD CARS.

Fred: My condolences. My husband turned to the dark side (left journalism for PR) long ago due to an inability to make a living at the former. My current employer (a physical therapy clinic) cut me back to 12 hrs a week a while back, so in order to keep paying my daughter's college tuition I have had to take a travel job--for the next 13 weeks I'll be living 200 miles away from my family and seeing them only on weekends. I wish I had some actual help to offer, but all I have is a flyball video. (If you ever get the chance to watch flyball live, do take the opportunity. It's a hoot and a half.)

[Fraser]

Our chain did the furlough last quarter. This quarter, the new CEO announced that we'd all have a 5 percent pay cut instead to avoid the problems caused by not having the people on furlough available)
While this is actually better for us financially (at least per quarter), it pissed off pretty much everyone because at least with a furlough we got something out of it (and given the economy, we were quite sure another one was coming).
My paper's lost three positions over the past couple of years, and it's definitely wearing us down. I'd be looking for something else already but since I'll be moving sometime in the next few months (and don't know exactly when yet) I have to wait for that.

[pointatinfinity]

There are worse consequences to this than that to poor Jacob being named Jacon. A couple of weeks ago, the Toronto Star printed an article about the company I work for that misstated things to the point of libel (I spoke to the people actually involved in the incident it was describing). Which was picked up by several other newspapers, was the subject of editorials who had only read the original article, and left our executive very tense. I am lucky enough to be in a position where I see the executive as real people with emotions and humour and favourite cookies rather than names and faces in print, and I could see how this was personal for them. Now I wonder how much of this was due to the Star not having the time, expense, or people to do fact-checking and confirmation that what the sentences implied was actually true.

[GrossAdmiral Herzog Hawker von Hurricane, etc. etc. etc.]

Ok, this may seem odd, but hear me out...

There have been several versions of this, but my favorite is the psuedo-fantasy "We Print the Truth". A newspaper owner is told by a departing employee he gets a wish (employee being a magical creature that looks human). The owners (not believing this for a moment) says he wishes that his newspaper always printed the truth. It's granted.
Pause for thought here... The owner no doubt meant that whatever the truth was would appear in his newspaper. But of course, the reverse happens: whatever is printed in his newspaper becomes the truth.
And so the smallest typos become chaos inducing events. For instance, the obituary of a 81 year old man misprints the age as 18...
The newspaper owner, once he realizes what's happening, vows to make his paper the best proofread paper of all time.

Quick research: the story is by Anthony Boucher, in 1943, and reprinted in "The Compleat Werewolf" in 1969.

[Wenzer]

This morning I was perusing my local rag and counted at least two typos in headlines. One, IIRC, was in an obit... they misspelled the name of the deceased.... It should come as no surprise to Fred that this comes after a round of layoffs at the local paper.

[Fraser]

Back when L. Frank Baum ran a paper in the Dakotas, he printed a wedding announcement and transposed a reference to the bride's rougeish cheek into a reference to her rougish cheek. He was challenged to a duel, but an apology eventually sufficed.

[Not Really Here , Defender of the Faith, Chair of Phlebotinum Research at the University of Texas (Austin Campus)]

Hawker-

Is that story available for online reading, by any chance?

One thing I've been observing about corporations over the past few years...

It seems like nearly all measures to increase corporate profits/share prices/whatever always seem to involve giving the customers less value for their money, whether it be in terms of reduced product/service quality, or reduced customer service/support. Both are often direct consequences of cutting payroll/staff.

[Ursula L]

Not to GM, apparently. They're trumpeting about how they're going to start selling cars that people want (isn't that how they got into this mess?). Meanwhile, Toyota continues its mind-blowingly innovative practice of BUILDING GOOD CARS.

Kodak had the same problem. You can still get a better image, with less work, using film. (You push the button, we do the rest.) And photography has a record for durability (there are many good photos over 150 years old) that digital can't match.

My dad spent years, in the 1980s and 1990s, trying to point out to people at Kodak that they needed to be selling the virtues of the product they had available, rather than pushing digital. There are times when you want digital photography - but if you want your great-grandkids to have pictures of grandma as a baby, your safe bet is to take the baby pictures of your daughter on film, not as a digital image. And definately save those images in hard-copy, rather than in any available digital medium.

But when Kodak started having problems, the managment solution was to bring in people from outside the industry, who had a record of turning businesses around, but who knew nothing about photography. They were seduced by the ideas of the people in the digital research department about all the cool things digital can do (and it can do many cool things) but no one could figure out how to make money from digital, and they ignored the cultivation of the product they had which was making them steady money at the time, but wasn't as new and interesting.

[Deoridhe]

I find it ironic, but not surprising, that people are arguing about a factual statement ("Some of us copy editors are women.") and coming up with reasons why pointing out a fact is somehow wrong, snide, or inappropriate, long after Fred corrected his piece.