Copy Desk

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.

A side effect of journalism on its practitioners is their stoic acceptance of the tragedies they often encounter. Reporters and editors aren't alone in this, of course. Like police officers and emergency room doctors, journalists instinctively adopt attitudes of dispassionate professionalism in the face of human pain. But as with all human beings, that pain can break through the toughest of protective shields. So it was on Dec. 6 when journalists coming to work at The Sun learned from their newsroom colleagues that the family of Steve Young, the newspaper's deputy copy desk chief, had been devastated by an early morning home fire.

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.

Commenting from Albion, the estimable Picky recently wrote: "As I look back on a very privileged life I note that although the language I spoke mostly as a child was that of the London streets, my parents (typically of the upper working class in those days they enriched English by reading Dickens and Trollope and Austen to each other in the evenings - anyone do that nowadays?) and my school together provided me also with something very close to standard English, and I traded on that, essentially made my living from it, for the rest of my life.

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.)

Dacia D. Dunson, a copy editor for The Sun who wrote of fighting her cancer over the past two years, died of the disease Friday at her Federal Hill home. She was 33. Born and raised in Anniston, Ala., she earned a bachelor's degree in mass communications from Auburn University in 1996. She became a speech teacher in Dallas public schools before joining the editing staff of Newsday in Long Island, N.Y., in 2000. She moved to Baltimore a year later when she joined the news copy desk of The Sun. "Everyone who knew Dacia loved her," said Jennifer Badie, features copy desk chief at The Sun. "She had friends throughout the newsroom - reporters, photographers, editors all gravitated to her. She was a thoughtful, caring friend who was always easy to talk to and always smiling.

At one end of a shelf in my office at the paragraph factory a plaque collects dust, through which it can be seen that John E. McIntyre successfully participated in The Times Mirror Leadership Institute for Managers. Twelve years ago, when there was still such a thing as Times Mirror.  Having been selected, I was given a choice of seances in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Huntington Beach, California. Not being entirely dim, I packed for the West Coast.  The Leadership Institute for Managers turned out to be a kind of summer camp for grown-ups.

Now that we're well and truly launched on 2012, we'll see no more of those tedious retrospectives about 2011 - high points, low points, deaths, regrets. For my part, my only regret, apart from not being a Powerball winner, is that “spritzing the bonobos” as an expression of futility did not catch on last year. I should mention to you, though, in case you got an early start on Hogmanay, Friday's post on why you should pay no attention to cranks complaining that this, that, or the other is “ruining” the language.

Carol Saller has a disturbing post at Lingua Franca on difficult writers. It's quite a stunner. My experience has been almost exclusively with newspaper reporters, who display none of the obnoxious characteristics Ms. Saller describes. On the contrary, newspaper reporters understand that the standards and purposes of the publication trump their personal preferences. They do not allow their egos to stand in the way of the work. They are collegial and cooperative with the copy desk, grateful, sometimes almost pathetically so, for the copy editor's efforts to correct error and smooth out rough prose.

In September 1986 I took a seat on the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun . It was only a few months previously that Times Mirror had bought the paper, so the newspaper I worked on that first night and the colleagues who produced it were still those of the A.S. Abell company. It is a vanished era, seeming nearly as remote as that four-page penny paper produced by A.S. Abell for the first time on this date in 1837. Today is The Sun 's 175th anniversary. You can call it the dodransbicentennial, or the septaquintaquinquecentennial,or some of the other coinages.