Editors

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.

The Sun is correct in its criticism of the proposed new congressional districts ("Politicians choose voters," Oct. 9). The editors tell us that the only way to change the system where politicians protect themselves is for the voters to punish them for that behavior. Let's hope the editors follow their own advice when they issue endorsements in the next election. Rick Williams, Baltimore

The nation's newspaper editors are in Baltimore. The bus driver got confused about which Beltway they wanted to be inside.Many people are floating Governor Cuomo's name for Supreme Court. Most of them are New York Republicans.Why not have the state own the Orioles? It invested the most in them.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors, assembling in )) Baltimore for its 70th national convention, will be inaugurating its first black president this week. He is William A. Hilliard, editor of the Portland Oregonian, and observers within the industry and without are probably thinking, it's about time.Big newspapers are published in big cities, where African-Americans cluster in huge and often majority numbers. Yet news and editorial operations, in terms of racial and ethnic diversity, do not often look like these cities.

A brief but fatuous article, "The Lonely Life of the Lowly Copy Editor"  by Yoni Goldstein in Canada's National Post  manages to retail every creaky cliche about the craft and its practitioners while displaying a startling ignorance of what is involved in editing.   The copy editor, we are to understand, is a socially awkward creature assigned to tend to minuscule errors after the reporters and assigning editors have vetted...

FREEING six editors from prison would be a positive result of the amnesty enacted by Turkey's parliament Thursday. They include a prominent Kurdish editor, Ocak Isik Yurtcu.This would reduce the journalists imprisoned for journalism in that NATO country to 72, as counted by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. It is a pay-off for a visit by leaders of the committee in July.Since Turkey is in many other respects a mature democracy, this continuing imprisonment of many more editors, writers and broadcasters than any other country holds is a continuing outrage.

The Baltimore Sun was judged to have one of the top 10 daily sports sections in the country at last week's Associated Press Sports Editors meeting in Tampa, Fla. The Sun's Sunday section was honored as one of the top 20 in the country, and The Sun's preview section on the 1993 Baseball All-Star Game at Camden Yards was voted one of the top 20 special sections of the year.In writing categories, Bill Glauber of The Sun was voted to be a finalist in feature stories for his piece on the fifth anniversary of the Orioles' 0-21 start.

Larry Bingham, a Sun staff writer, has won first place for general feature writing in the 14th annual Excellence-in-Writing Competition sponsored by the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors. Bingham won for "The Farmer's Wife," an Oct. 21 profile of Terri Wolf, an Eastern Shore woman widowed by a fire that destroyed her family home. It was the second consecutive year Bingham has won first place in the category for newspapers of more than 300,000 circulation. The award carries a $1,000 cash prize.

Two foolish, under-aged, teenage girls drinking and sitting on a freight train bridge, dangling their feet 20 feet above the street at midnight while Tweeting ("Derailed lives," Aug. 22), then buried in coal? The girls contributed significantly to their tragic demise. As in "self-inflicted. " The Sun's coverage included information about CSX accidents of the past ("CSX has history of Md. mishaps"). Why not a companion article about the jobs and economic benefit that CSX brings to Maryland and the danger of trespassing on railroad tracks and freight train bridges?

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.