What Copy Editors Do

Dean Singleton said the O word about copy editing at a meeting yesterday. ACES' leader, Chris Wienandt, points out far more succinctly than I could why outsourcing copy editing is a bad idea. At this point Dean probably would like anything that would let him pay the bills, and he has always seen copy editing as the sort of back-shop check-processing operation that you only keep until you can figure out a way to get rid of it.

But I do fear that part of what allows people like Dean to bring up these ideas is copy editors' tendency to martyr themselves as underappreciated cogs who will throw themselves into the machine to die rather than let a deadline be missed and then say, If the bosses valued what I was doing they would reward me, but they are not rewarding me so I will do it again just to spite them.

My former colleague Steve Lovelady once described all journalists as shy egomaniacs, and many copy editors I have known fit the bill precisely. Just as often, copy editors say of top editors, "They have no idea what we do." Clearly Dean Singleton has no idea. But yes, we have all known non-copy editors who would look at a story with five major and 20 minor flaws and say, "Seems all right to me. What's your problem?" We often dismiss them as idiots, but over time I have come to see that many of them just don't see what we see, any more than I would see the problematic weld that could bring a bridge down. That, of course, is why you are supposed to trust experts -- but it's hard for many editors to not see themselves as experts in everything journalistic.

If copy editors are only seen as the people who lay out pretty pages and put wire stories in the paper and make sure that we use "who" instead of "whom," then yes, a case could be made for commoditizing that work and selling it overseas for the cheapest rate possible -- not a case I would support, but a case. And I'm sure there are papers that have copy editors who only do that, because I have twice worked for editors who essentially wanted that. There will always be journalists who feel that errors do not undermine larger truths, who see copy editing as quibbling, who just want to go home, who think "alacrity" means "reverently" because it must be what "alack" comes from.

But a good newspaper's copy editor needs to know to look up on a map the street that runs from my town to the Ben Franklin Bridge because it is variously known as Main Street, Camden Avenue, Maple Avenue and Federal Street. and to double-check in which town each name takes effect. That in Philadelphia neighborhood boundaries matter a great deal and in Indianapolis they matter barely at all. That Councilman Bill Green is not the same person as former Mayor Bill Green and that former Mayor Wilson Goode's first name is Willie but it would be a rare occasion when you published it. That Dunkin' Donuts has an apostrophe and that saying "it happened when customers were present" does not mean it happened in the daytime even though police said that. That one state in your coverage area calls the crime DWI and another DUI. That in one state General Assembly describes the entire legislature and in another it is the name for the House. That "the Fightin's" is what people call the Phillies and should not be changed to "the Fightings." That the district attorney's name is Risa Vetri Ferman and not any of the 25 ways you could get that wrong just by hitting the wrong key.

And a newspaper copy editor partly needs to know this from memory so that minutes do not have to be lost checking references -- but mostly a newspaper copy editor needs to know what can go wrong, what questions to ask, what experience has taught him or her. If you don't know Resa Veti Furman seems odd, why would you question it? If you don't think the weld would be problematic, why would you point it out? Oops, there goes the bridge.

The problem for copy editors is that their job consists of catching other people's slipups -- because to err is human -- and thus it seems unseemly to go around pointing out what we do. It makes others look bad, and it's a lot more fun to talk about investigations we want to do. But then owners and business managers look at pages and headlines and say, oh, that's all that copy editors do. The Times of India has pages and headlines too. Hey, let's save money!

It misses the fact that the reader expects the newspaper to be His Newspaper. And he lives somewhere that he expects the newspaper to know as well as he does. And the more we weaken that connection, the more the newspaper becomes dispensible, whatever form it is delivered in.

I expect readers in India feel the same way. There are entrepreneurs there, though, who will be happy to take our money to watch us further destroy ourselves. As long as the check clears.