At one point in my youthful past, I played softball on a team sponsored by my employer, The Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil newspaper. The boss sprung for a bunch of snazzy jerseys, emblazoned with the newspaper's name across the front. Sadly, the jerseys arrived with "Nonpaeil" (the "r" missing) in big block letters. I suggested that we just add an insert mark between the a and e, put the missing r above the text and call ourselves the Typos, since that's pretty much how the community viewed us anyway.
The boss saw no humor in that and sent the uniforms back for re-lettering. As the accompanying photo shows, even major league baseball teams can have a typo problem. Truth is, everybody needs an editor. As an ex-editor myself, I'm probably more sensitive to these things, but it seems like typos (and just plain bad grammar) are everywhere. So when I learned that the esteemed New York Times was getting rid of some of its editors, it kind of raised my hackles.
In this era of cable news, obliterated "news cycles" and shareholder pressures, editors seem to be the expendables, the first to fall in the race to the bottom. This is more than shameful. It's stupid.
Let's face it: If newspapers have superstars, it's their reporters. The Washington Post and New York Times have rosters chock-full of superstars, many of them given apparent carte blanche to swing away in the current target-rich environment of big-league national politics. Prime time cable programs love to have their print brethren on their programs, where they hype their latest works well in advance of their formerly standard a.m. print debuts. I can't say for certain, but I'll bet there's a strong bench of editors backstopping those stories.
I suspect much of the public thinks of editors as proofreaders. Nothing could be further from the truth, though some news organizations appear to have accepted a computer's spellcheck function as a reasonable alternative to real editing. Editors do much more than correct spelling. At the upper echelons of newsroom editors, there's a lot of planning and resource management necessary if a gaggle of reporters is to function coherently and not devolve into a chaotic tribe of scribes trampling each other in pursuit of personal glory. It's another tier of editors that actually works closely with reporters, guiding them through the reporting and writing process of complex stories before turning them over to the heart of the editing operation, the copy desk.
Copy editors do check stories for spelling, punctuation and grammar, but that's just a small fraction of their duties. They also act as fact checkers — correcting mistakes and clarifying fuzzy portions of the story. They look for weaknesses in the stories they edit, often sending them back to reporters for additional reporting. They look for areas that could get the newspaper into legal trouble (publishers are responsible for libelous statements that appear in their publications). Contrary to popular opinion, reporters don't write headlines; editors do.
Editors also make stories fit a certain "hole." Newspapers have a certain neatness to them, every story with a headline and fitting in its assigned spot. That doesn't just happen. An editor decides how much space to give a story and another editor makes sure it fits. It's not unusual to reduce a story by 70 percent or more. That takes skill; an editor's skill. And much of this happens on deadline. Reporters often hang onto stories as long as they can. That cuts into an editor's time. Some reporters (even famous, prize-winning ones) need extensive editing.
Since I left the daily newspaper business more than 11 years ago, I can't tell you how things work today, but I can tell you how things worked at The Des Moines Register for most of the 25 years I worked there.
Perhaps the biggest factor in my leaving my job as sports editor of a moderately sized Iowa newspaper to become a copy editor at the Register was that the paper took its journalistic responsibility seriously. Its leaders routinely monitored news operations around the state, luring distinguished, experienced journalists from every corner of Iowa. There was great geographic and generational diversity among the staff, which was challenged by a relatively young, bright cadre of editorial leaders.
The editing operation was most impressive. Once copy was turned over to the copy desk, it went through a rigorous, multilayered editing process before appearing in print. A news editor mapped out the next day's pages and a "slot editor" managed the actual editing, assigning stories to individual editors. The slot editor reviewed the edited story before deciding whether it needed further editing or could be set in type. Once set in type, proofs of the story were returned to the newsroom to be checked again. After a page was assembled, a proof of the entire page was sent to the newsroom to be read.
Between editions (we had as many as five editions every night), the actual printed pages were checked yet again and the process of creating a new edition started all over again. Stories often changed between editions, further complicating the process.
The process may appear to be cumbersome, but it was an effective way to ensure accuracy while providing complete and timely information to Register readers. The multilayered approach to editing had a beneficial effect on reporters as well. Knowing when they were expected to file a story and how long it should be imposed a discipline that placed a premium on clarity and word choice.
I don't know how the editing protocol works at the Register today, but I do see the final product — and the results after several rounds of staff layoffs are sadly predictable. More mistakes find their way into the edition I receive in suburban Des Moines. Deadlines appear to be much earlier, given that many reports on evening events are incomplete (or missing altogether) in the next morning's paper. Oversight, too, appears to be missing. One sports report last winter listed high school basketball scores from South Dakota instead of Iowa. Stories are often repeated in separate sections. Space that was previously filled by a wide diversity of carefully edited stories from a variety of respected wire services is now filled by huge photographs or bloated staff-written stories.
To be fair to the reporting staff, I think many Register staffers are immensely talented and hardworking. Their responsibilities have changed greatly in recent years. Even with several editions, reporters "back in the day" knew that they were writing for an audience that would be reading their work the next morning at the earliest. The internet changed that. Today's newspaper reporters are expected to file as soon as possible to get their story online before the competition. Many of them are expected to shoot photos and video, too, calling for skills much different from traditional reporting at a major newspaper. That has got to be a stressful work environment, especially when management, when justifying an earlier round of editor layoffs, said reporters will be expected to turn in stories suitable for publication on the spot. In my experience, that's always been the expectation, but rarely the reality.
Newspapers, which have been on a losing streak for a long, long time, are in a tough spot. That buying-ink-by-the-barrel thing has proved to be more of an albatross than a golden goose. Most papers have yet to find a solution to their dwindling readership. That lost classified advertising is never coming back. Ditto for car ads, real estate ads and those expensive national ads. The transition to paid obituaries has helped, but those older dead people also represent lost subscribers. For most of my professional career, newspapers struggled to stay relevant to younger readers, a battle that was lost long ago.
It saddens me to see what's happened to newspapers in recent decades, and I have no idea how to reverse the trend. One thing I do know, though: Getting rid of editors is a bad idea.
This blog post was guest edited by Kurt Helland, a gifted editor who spent many years at The Des Moines Register before joining the Des Moines Business Record. One quality of a top-flight copy editor is that copy can be improved by changes imperceptible to the original writer. Kurt passes that test admirably and I am extremely grateful that he accepted the challenge of improving the work of what our former colleague Maury White often referred to as "an ink-stained ragamuffin." Thanks, Kurt.
