Copy Desk

Gregory Moore, the editor of the Denver Post , is, I believe, a good man grappling with a difficult challenge. The Post , as described in an article at Poynter.org by Steve Myers , is essentially eliminating its copy desk. Eleven are going or gone, a couple have been reassigned to other duties, and the nine survivors become assistant editors assigned to the various newsroom departments. When explanations of these and similar changes are made, there is talk of moving away from "assembly-line editing" and "outmoded nineteenth-century industrial processes" to some bold, modern, fresh, immediate journalism that removes all those unnecessary "touches" between the writer and the reader.

I hate to seem disloyal, but it doesn't take much to touch off a kerfuffle among copy editors. And now a new one is underway.  Yes, underway , the word the Associated Press Stylebook , in all its pomp and majesty declared last week to be a single word in all senses, in saecula saeculorum , amen, amen. Before last week, many copy editors maintained a fleeting sense of superiority over mere wordmongers by distinguishing the two-word nautical under way , from the common, garden variety, landlubber underway . Ships get underway ; projects get underway .  Unfortunately for that gossamer distinction, English, like German, possesses a wordsrunningtogethertendency, and, over time, even the nautical sense has fused the two words into one. David Minthorn and Darrell Christian, editors of the AP Stylebook , acknowledged as much last week at the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society in St. Louis: "That's what's in the dictionary.

As copy desks gradually pass into history at the hands of sharp-pencil corporate functionaries who do not believe in editing, let us spare a moment to rescue from You Don't Say 's archives a handful of the heroic moments of the craft.     GREAT MOMENTS IN COPY DESK HISTORY I   On an otherwise uneventful evening in May 1982, the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer was at work on the first edition. Webb Matthews was following the wire services.

Having achieved a degree of notoriety as an editor, I find myself in the uncomfortable role of mentor. A while back, I spent a year as a mentor to a younger newspaper editor in a program set up by the Maynard Institute, and there were a number of young editors whom I hired, when newspapers still hired people, whose careers I was able to foster. Now I find myself about to advise a would-be editor in a different program. It's a little awkward because of the circuitous route by which I found my own path.

Yesterday I was introduced to a new reporter at The Sun  and described as the editor in charge of the copy desk.  "Oh," he said, "you're the one who will kill my darlings. " I said, "I prefer to think of it as euthanasia. "     

The Baltimore Sun 's sports department is looking for reporting and copy desk interns for the summer of 2013. Internships are unpaid and require students to receive academic credit. Our reporting interns write about college and high school sports, minor league baseball, professional lacrosse and outdoors and recreation, in addition to contributing to our coverage of the Preakness, Baltimore Ravens training camp and the Baltimore Orioles. Reporting interns have the opportunity to write features, notebooks, game stories, blog posts and more.

A commenter remarked once that I seem to be a little severe on writers. Full marks for perceptiveness.  Let me tell you what it was like for copy editors in the medieval mists of a quarter-century and more ago. Copy editors worked mainly at night, when the important people had gone home. They worked weekends and holidays. The good that they did in correcting errors was invisible; merciful Lord help them if they inserted an error. And they were objects of scorn.  Reporters would casually say that copy editors took a text and "ran it through the dull machine.

Hervey Brackbill(1901-1999)Hervey Brackbill was telegrapher, reporter, copy editor, birdwatcher, music critic, bird essayist, slot man, bird bander, features editor, birder. He died March 6. Two more years, and he would also have been a centenarian.Sighting that name as an Evening Sun editorial page byline, many Baltimoreans took it for a nom de birdplume. But no: Swiss forebears spelt it Brechbuehl.Brack was a printer's son. Leaving Lancaster, Pa., after high school, Brack worked for Western Union -- telegrams were yesterday's e-mail, sort of -- and then, in Baltimore, for the Associated Press.

Yesterday, winter arrived in Baltimore, with the sun shining and temperatures in the middle sixties. I really should have gone outside to rake up the remaining oak leaves from our neighbor's trees and do something about all those damned Higgs bosons, but I had holiday preparations to do. And today dawns Festivus. The aluminum pole is up in the living room. I am putting off the Feats of Strength, because later I will go to the paragraph factory to sit as the supervising editor on the news desk and shepherd through (and do a goodly amount of primary copy editing on)

I think it's fair to say that Benjamin J. Marrison, editor of The Columbus Dispatch , is forthright. Here is what he said in an article in yesterday's editions: “Thursday's front page made me want to vomit.” Thursday's front page misspelled the first name of the president of the United States, twice. And Mr. Marrison went on to recount other instances of embarrassing errors creeping into his pages. I'm not going to badmouth The Dispatch , where I have been a guest on a couple of occasions, and some of whose copy editors I have known for years and whose chagrin I can share.

The Baltimore Sun 's sports department is looking for reporting and copy desk interns for the summer of 2013. Internships are unpaid and require students to receive academic credit. Our reporting interns write about college and high school sports, minor league baseball, professional lacrosse and outdoors and recreation, in addition to contributing to our coverage of the Preakness, Baltimore Ravens training camp and the Baltimore Orioles. Reporting interns have the opportunity to write features, notebooks, game stories, blog posts and more.

Reporters love online publishing because it allows them to write at whatever length they choose and frees them from the constraint of print. They can uncap the well of their inky prose and let the reader frolic in the gusher, without fear that some hack on the copy desk will mutilate their burnished sentences.* They may be misguided. I do not fear prose. I've read what the children call chapter books, thick ones, for decades. I do not quail at long articles in, say, The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books . (I actually read and enjoyed that series on cereal grains published in the waning years of the Shawn era, the ones that were widely disparaged by people who had not read them.)

Yesterday I was introduced to a new reporter at The Sun  and described as the editor in charge of the copy desk.  "Oh," he said, "you're the one who will kill my darlings. " I said, "I prefer to think of it as euthanasia. "     

A commenter remarked once that I seem to be a little severe on writers. Full marks for perceptiveness.  Let me tell you what it was like for copy editors in the medieval mists of a quarter-century and more ago. Copy editors worked mainly at night, when the important people had gone home. They worked weekends and holidays. The good that they did in correcting errors was invisible; merciful Lord help them if they inserted an error. And they were objects of scorn.  Reporters would casually say that copy editors took a text and "ran it through the dull machine.

I am responding to a researcher's questionnaire about editing and the role of the editor. One question invites me to suggest a metaphor for editing, and the first that occurred to me is one I have made previously in these dispatches: surgery. Editors must deal with the text as it is. Sometimes the best we can achieve is to make the substandard mediocre, because, as I often quote Anthony Trollope, "One cannot pour out of a jug more than is in it. " So we as editors start looking for diseased tissue to excise.

A brash notice of reporter openings by Dolan Media of New Orleans got some attention in the trade last week. Here is what my colleague Bruce Holtgren had to say about the request in it for aspirants to mail examples of their best work: I would hope you are well aware that all clips have been edited. Great editors, time and again, elevate stories that came in as pretty good to great, or from great to awesome; or even mediocre to fantastic. They catch gaping holes and save reporters' shoddy work; they suggest angles that the reporter didn't think of. Editors fix horrendous errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation, facts, local history, even prominent people's names.

Paul D. White, a retired Evening Sun editor, died of apparent heart failure Monday at his Kingsville farm. He was 76.He joined the Evening Sun as a copy editor in 1953 and held various editing positions, including telegraph editor, until he retired in 1986."

Paul Rhodes Mattix III, night news editor of The Sun whose career in newspapers spanned nearly three decades, died Monday from complications of lymphoma at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Wyman Park resident was 53. Mr. Mattix was born and raised in Bethesda and graduated in 1969 from Walter Johnson High School. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maryland in 1973. He returned to College Park to earn a second bachelor's degree, this one in journalism, in 1976. In 1977, he began his career in layout and copy editing at the Charleston Evening Post in Charleston, S.C. He took a similar position the next year at The Capital in Annapolis.

Yesterday's post, "A future for copy editors," in which I expanded on some advice to the trade by Steve Buttry, has attracted several comments, but you probably don't know that. Because of defects in the blogware, the counter on the post registers zero comments. But some of them, particularly those by Picky and Brian Throckmorton, are quite astute and valuable, so I am republishing them here.   johnwcowan What kind of bar can you open on severance packages which amount to the total of your as-yet-unclaimed vacation days for the year?

Gregory Moore, the editor of the Denver Post , is, I believe, a good man grappling with a difficult challenge. The Post , as described in an article at Poynter.org by Steve Myers , is essentially eliminating its copy desk. Eleven are going or gone, a couple have been reassigned to other duties, and the nine survivors become assistant editors assigned to the various newsroom departments. When explanations of these and similar changes are made, there is talk of moving away from "assembly-line editing" and "outmoded nineteenth-century industrial processes" to some bold, modern, fresh, immediate journalism that removes all those unnecessary "touches" between the writer and the reader.