News-Record.com

At the risk of catching grief from my fellow reporters, I believe that we could use one more editor in the newsroom.

Agreed: Reporters don't come to here fully baked. The extra work I received in the first year here changed a lot about what I do and how I do it.

At the risk of catching grief from my fellow reporters, I believe that we could use one more editor in the newsroom.

Agreed: Reporters don't come here fully baked. The extra work I received in my first year here changed a lot about what I do and how I do it.

"Editors make up about 20% of our staff..." JR

Wow! Really? Of the N&R's entire staff or your news division?

JR, at least one other set of eyes must scrutinize even the best writer's work. Case in point: "Does a story need to edited by more than one person?" (Missing something, isn't it?)

Do those eyes have to be a copy editor's? For 30 years the English teachers have told me (and probably you, too) to bring back proofreaders. Perhaps, in this age, facing severe budget pressure in the publishing industry, the schoolmarms may be onto something.

Thanks, Steve. I sprinkled in some mistakes to make my point. :)

Roch, that is the percentage in the news department.

Thanks, John, for this defense of editors. Saying that editors are just duplicating work suggests they add nothing. We know that is not the case.

Two contrary points:
1. You can't afford to have 20 percent of your staff featherbedding in this climate where newspapers are losing revenues and profit shares. If you insist on this ratio, you are fostering a suicide pact, and also are wasting a hell of a lot of talent on make-work jobs.
2. You say you need editors because reporters don't come to you fully baked. Why? Aren't you paying them a salary? If they don't want to become experienced adults and professional reporters, then fire them. The industry standard of the Internet age is that reporters are required to write and post clean copy. Thanks to the layoffs in the news industry, they are plentiful. So why should you put up with those who cannot meet standards?

Those aren't contrary points, at least not the first one. I agree no paper should have 20 percent of the staff featherbedding. We don't.

I've never worked anywhere in which a new employee comes in and knows everything there is to know. Examples are plentiful of reporters even at the largest and best-paying newspapers who make mistakes and don't hit the standards you refer to. Mutter references a couple in his piece.

While I agree 20 percent of a newsroom committed to editing is hard to support in the current economic climate, my instinct is that the percentage will actually grow over time. Two reasons:

One, in an attempt to gain control over expenses - and not unlike other businesses - newspapers will turn over its most experienced reporters for younger, less well-paid writers. They will require more intensive editing as they grow their skills.

Two, smaller staffs, the internet, and reader submitted content will ultimately require a new layer of management. As newspapers turn to other sources for content to supplant cuts in payroll and expense - stories, photographs and video - it becomes inevitable that newsgathering is replaced by news editing.

At that point, you'll have to ask yourself if you achieved anything replacing experienced reporters with editors to manage unknown content.

OIC, JR. "_T_he New York Times."

For a third reason I agree with D Thomas that editing slots may or should increase. I don't use the same writing styles for print and online. Shovelware -- dumping the print product on the Web without alteration -- doesn't work, except with some exceptionally well-written, reader-relevant, compelling stories. My online writing tends to be tight, terse, telegraphic. It usually includes links that must be checked. I also try to SEO the head, lede and nut graf. Now I need someone to read two versions of a story, and that's without considering multimedia additions. It all throws more work on an editor or copydesk.

Also -- and I mentioned this in a post to your blog last year -- I still worry about letting an employee's words go up on a company-hosted blog without someone else checking the piece first. There's a lot of exposure to liability. Remind your beancounters that avoiding a single lawsuit might more than cover an editor's salary for the next five or 10 years.

you have to ask why a blog piece needs the sharp eye of an editor before it's worthy of print? when was the last time another pair of eyes saved your ass? this morning?, i thought so.

This morning, William? Uh, yes. After I posted an earlier comment, my writing partner pointed out how I mangled a sentence, leading to a possible interpretation that schoolmarms were "facing severe budget pressure in the publishing industry." Libelous, no? Embarrassing, yes. I immediately posted a revision, but JR probably saw that as a duplicate post and deleted it. Unintentionally, I illustrated one risk of posting unedited copy.

Honestly, I don't worry about individual bloggers' unedited remarks. My concern is with stories, including blog entries, that go up on COMPANY-hosted web sites. Those would be the likely targets for litigation and, IMO, the items that require more scrutiny before being posted.

Heck, I thought William was talking about me, Steve. For the record, you're right. I did delete what I thought was a duplicate post. Sorry about that.

I can't speak to what the editors in News do during the day because (a) I've never been one, and (b) I have scant dealings with them. But I can speak to my three-year tenure in Sports. If I had been there today, I would have:

* planned out our preps coverage for the week and worked with the high school sports writer and our photo staff to figure out who was shooting and writing what.
* done a post-mortem on our Daytona 500 coverage with our NASCAR writer, who's writing a feature for Tuesday's paper. (I went over an early draft with him today anyway. Old habits die hard.) We also would have figured out the possible story lines for next weekend at California and tried to anticipate any mid-week news (penalties, mostly) that might pop up.
* checked in with our columnist, who's coming home after a few days in Daytona
* blogged about the 500
* updated the college basketball agate from the weekend
* figured out (and typed out) the high school conference basketball tourney sked for the week and started looking ahead at the state playoffs, which start next week
* taken care of my daily chores, including writing promos, attending one of the budget meetings, dealing with questions and concerns from readers/callers/e-mailers and meeting with the Sports copy desk at the start of their night shift.
* do whatever else I needed to do so reporters had the time to, you know, report.

Sorry to be so long-winded, but the extended point I'm trying to make is this: There's more to being a newspaper editor than just waving your eyes over copy at 5 p.m. every day.

okay, boys and girls: lesson 1 in news/feature writing 101 (for publication): the worst editor in the whole wide world is the author.

always has been, is today, and likely will be from this day forward.

To judge by even the subject matter, it appears some folks may watch too many movies about newspapers, where copy desks don't exist. It's always the brilliant reporter and the brilliant managing editor that print the story, which moves the story along but doesn't reflect real life much, just like most movies. And maybe they never see raw copy. And maybe they don't understand that libel can be very costly, even without a trial. The many blogs I see are in dire need of an editor: typos, misspellings, illiteracy, ill-considered ranting, uninformed opinion masquerading as journalism, and many more sins against language and understanding.
People don't want a "filter"? People who say that generally only want to read stuff that agrees with their limited experience of the world, and their preconceived ideas. Just like movies, they all have happy endings, because the "unfiltered" news agrees with the less-than-curious, maybe a little lazy, all along.
There are filters. Citizens can't possible read everything that moves on the wires, and they don't have time to read everything else out there. They've probably got another job.
Finally, let's take up a "scoop" brought to us by some attentive blogger: CBS's blundered reporting over George W. Bush's National Guard service. The resulting hullabaloo served to mask the truth of the story, left forgotten the president's missing year of service. I don't see how that serves the greater truth.
And perhaps CBS was in need of another, disinterested editor?

As a longtime copy editor and copy editing prof, I can say with a great deal of certainty that if the standard of requiring print (or online) reporters "to write clean copy," were in place and people who couldn't do so were summarily dismissed, newsroom expenditures would decrease to a level that might even bring a smile to the face of stockholders. The trick would be to figure out how to publish a news report without reporters.


Incidentally, at most papers, the percentage of editors of all types is more than 20. More like 30 to 40.

I like John Russial's phrase: "editors of all types." Up to a point, reporters and other people in the newsroom can take over editing tasks. However, the editing function is indispensable in journalism -- whether it's practiced in print, in broadcasting or online. You can perform that function with fewer editors, but someone else must perform the job.

Until 2006, I worked at a seven-day N.C. community daily with _no_ copy editors. The news editor (until they eliminated the job) and editorial-page editor (ditto) did double duty as copy editors. With two editors gone, reporters edited each other's copy, informally and inconsistently. Absent two "(copy) editors of all types," the news product declined. Despite the reporters' efforts, writers and copy editors still have different mindsets. Few people can do both jobs equally well. In this instance, both writing and editing suffered. Subscribers fled. The owners sold the paper.

The new owner did not add any editors (in fact, it dropped two more: sports editor and associate editor). Because the remaining editor was unable to keep up with the copy flow, the new proprietor saw no reason to add to his burden by hiring more reporters. Now the paper runs only a few local stories each day. Total paid circulation has fallen from 9,100 to 8,700 (4.3 percent) in six months. Few people here will be surprised when the paper ends its Monday or Saturday edition.

Bottom line: editors may not increase value, but they at least maintain it.

Unfortunately, our corporate owners may not see the bottom-line effect of reducing the number of editors until our margins shrink to the single digits, and even then they'll blame the losses on the Internet instead of their "cut the costs to restore profitability" strategy.