Every writer needs an editor. Or, why subs are worth their weight in gold

I am a huge, huge fan of Poynter. In my opinion, it is the No. 1 journalism site. Which is why there are numerous pieces on The Reading Room that refer to articles that were first published on Poynter.org.

The most recent Poynter post is a brilliant example of writing that not only promotes good journalism but also offers a new way to think about some of the processes involved in putting together a good story. The post, by Alison MacAdam, is titled "Journalism has an editing crisis, but we can do something about it".

Unfortunately, the column is also a good example of the time-honoured dictum: Every writer (including Alison MacAdam) needs an editor.

Here are the comments I posted after I read the column this morning:

Ramesh Prabhu • 4 hours ago In India, too, there is an immense lack of strong editors. Which is why I tell my students (I teach journalism at a media college in Bangalore) good subs, or copy editors, are worth their weight in gold. Having said that, may I point out an editing error in this piece? "We now create far more content that any reasonable human being could ever read..." should have been edited to read "We now create far more content than any reasonable human being could ever read..."

Ramesh Prabhu • 4 hours ago Also, "...we’re 'creating content' for 25-34 year-old women or Latino millennials" should have been edited to read "...we’re 'creating content' for 25- to 34-year-old women or Latino millennials." Suspensive hyphenation, anyone?

I'm not the only one who has spotted errors in the article:

MM Greene  Hugh Vandivier • 8 hours ago Don't forget the three misplaced cases of "only." Look, editors exist!

N.B: Don't let the editing issues detract from the sound argument Alison MacAdam is making on behalf of editors. You can read the post in its entirety here.

Also read:

Suspensive hyphenation

Why subs, or copy editors, are the lifeblood of a news organisation

And this is what happens when subs fall asleep on the job

Point your mouse to Poynter... and to Roy Peter Clark

We can't ignore typos in a blog post by a sub-editor, can we?

We can't ignore typos in a blog post by a sub-editor, can we?

A few days ago I came across a terrific blog post titled "A day in the life of a sub-editor". Everything written in the piece spoke to me because I've been a deskman all my life. But... there were two horrible typos that ruined the article for me. So I wrote to the commissioning editor of The Walkley Foundation, the Australian organisation that publishes the blog:

Hello Clare,

This is Ramesh Prabhu, professor of journalism at a media college in Bangalore, India.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this "excerpt" from Charles Purcell's diary.

​I was a deskman for many years with newspapers in India and Dubai, so I get where he's coming from.

May I point out a couple of typos, though?

In the first paragraph​, there's this line: "...educate them into the correct use of 'myriad'."

Shouldn't that be "...educate them on the correct use of 'myriad'"?

Of course, I understand "...educate them into..." may be a colloquialism in your part of the world. But in the second paragraph there is surely a typo:

"Passenger accuses me of vandalism, until I point at that I am, in fact, a sub-editor..."

That should be "Passenger accuses me of vandalism, until I point out that I am, in fact, a sub-editor..."

Regards,

Ramesh

***
Not too long afterwards, I received this e-mail from Clare:

Hi Ramesh,

Thank you for your email, it’s wonderful to know we have a reader in Bangalore. Glad you enjoyed the piece, and thank you for pointing out the typos – I knew it was only a matter of time before someone spotted something!

We’ve corrected those now.

Thanks again,

Clare Fletcher

Program Manager
The Walkley Foundation for Journalism
Commissioning Editor
The Walkley Magazine
T: +612 9333 0925 | M: +61432 616 810 | E: clare.fletcher@walkleys.com  |  www.walkleys.com

***
Now I can happily recommend "A day in the life of a sub-editor" to everyone. Read it here.

RE CORRECTING TYPOS, ALSO READ:

• An e-mail interaction with author Dinty Moore — Why American writer Dinty Moore is all praise for Indian speakers and writers of English

• An e-mail interaction with The New York Times — In 8 minutes, a response from The New York Times to my e-mail pointing out a typo in a headline

• An e-mail interaction with author Mardy Grothe —  It all depends on the telling, sure. But surely who does the telling matters?

10 interesting — and relevant — articles to inspire media professionals, especially young journalists and journalism aspirants

1. "The best farewell address by a journalist":

‘At The [NY] Times, you can imagine yourself making journalism that changes the world’

• "This so inspiring," wrote Commitscion Barkha Joshi (Class of 2016) on my Facebook wall soon after I posted this link yesterday.

2. Taking magazine cover design to new heights:

How they did it: "Behind the Making of Our Walking New York Cover"

3. An essay adapted from Tales from the Great Disruption: Insights and Lessons from Journalism’s Technological Transformation, by Michael Shapiro, Anna Hiatt, and Mike Hoyt:

"The Value of News"

An excerpt:

... I can think of no better distillation of what exists at the heart of the relationship between journalism and its audiences than the phrase that Lisa Gubernick, a wonderful journalist at Forbes and the Journal, used to open every single conversation, professional and personal. She would ask, “What’s new and interesting?”

4. Journalists talk about what is perhaps their greatest fear:

"Fear of screwing up"

An excerpt:

To be a journalist, you have to be afraid. Fear makes you triple-check your work. It makes you sharper, faster, more focused. It wakes you up in the middle of the night, or drops in unexpectedly at that party or dinner. Fear demands that you be absolutely sure you want to say every little thing you’re saying. 

"I have enough fear to do my job well. Brilliant article," wrote Commitscion Abira Banerjee (Class of 2015) on my Facebook wall the day after I posted this link.

5. Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron on journalism’s transition from print to digital:

“Journalism’s Big Move: What to Discard, Keep, and Acquire in Moving From Print to Web”

 

6. Rolling Stone magazine and the controversial university rape article:

Do scandals like Rolling Stone’s do lasting damage to journalism?

An excerpt:

While many agreed Rolling Stone’s failure harmed the media’s reputation, they also said it and the industry could repair the damage. The larger threats to journalism, many of them added, are more gradual systemic changes, from the implosion of business models to false balance in public “controversies.”

7. "A year after the firings of two top women editors, four journalism leaders discuss the challenges of editing while female."

"Can you think about rising?"

8. "Many writers are fond of semicolons; we use them a lot; even when we shouldn’t; and we often don’t know how to use them. (One clue: not the way we just did.)"

"To semicolon, or not to semicolon"

9. A well-deserved tribute to veteran journalist P. Sainath and his team:

"Documenting India's Villages Before They Vanish"

An excerpt:

So far, Sainath has recruited more than 1,000 volunteers for the archive project, ranging from 30-year veterans of the journalism business to software engineers who’ve written nary a word. They’ve documented some fascinating characters. One of them is a 73-year-old librarian who manages a trove of 170 classics, mostly translations of Russian masters, in a tiny forest village frequented by wild elephants.

Also read: A savvy, must-watch documentary on the peerless P. Sainath

10. "Copy-editing can be a great job. I’ve always been grateful for the work and especially for the people I’ve met, copy editors, fact checkers, editors, and writers alike."

"Workers of the word, unite"

• Also read: All hail the Comma Queen!

All hail the Comma Queen!

When a copy editor of the Salon e-zine chats up the copy editor of New Yorker magazine who also happens to have published a book about her profession, what results is an interview that puts the spotlight on a vital job: editing.

Here is a sample Q&A: 

Q: Schools are teaching grammar a lot less and relying on technology and word processing programmes to “teach” it by default, pointing out grammar mistakes. Do you think this, not to mention texting and tweeting, will have a significant effect on the grammar and spelling of future adults? 

A: That’s not a very nice way to learn, just by having your mistakes pointed out. But there are fun ways to do it: “Schoolhouse Rock,” for instance, and pop music. Lately, Weird Al Yankovic has been singing about grammar and usage. Texting and tweeting shouldn’t really affect grammar, though spell-check programmes and autocorrect will have an effect on spelling. I believe that the only way to learn English grammar is to study a foreign language.

MARY NORRIS: COPY THAT!

Q: Your profanity chapter is full of hilarious examples of language writers are competing to get into the magazine. One piece by Ben McGrath debuted “bros before hos” in the New Yorker, creating a spelling dilemma with “hos”—hmm, I see that Webster’s gives the plural of “ho” as either “hos” or “hoes.” Where do you turn if it’s not in the dictionaries of record? 

A: When a word is not in Webster’s or Random House, I will look online. There are many dictionaries of slang, but you have to choose your source carefully. One of our sources is the New York Times, but of course it’s no good for profanity! One feels so silly looking up “jism,” say (though there are variant spellings), and even sillier querying it. You try to find a respectable source for the profanity, and it is a bit of a challenge. Rap lyrics, especially.

Read this fascinating feature in its entirety here: New Yorker copyeditor dishes on the wacky side of her (quite dignified) job: “One feels so silly looking up [profanity]” 

• ALSO READ: "Workers of the Word, Unite"

• ADDITIONAL READING: Why subs, or copy editors, are the lifeblood of a news organisation

And this is what happens when subs fall asleep on the job

This news report — see below — was printed in the now-defunct Vijay Times, a Bangalore newspaper, on December 26, 2003. I use it every year to point out to my students that sub-editors, or copy editors, play a very important role in newspaper production and this is what can happen when a sub falls asleep on the job:

Here's the text of the report:

BE AWARE OF 'FAKE'
POLICE IN SHIMOGA

Shimoga: The ladies of the city listen here. If anybody told you as police being called you, just shout for help. Attract the people who are being around you. Then only you could preserve your jewellers from the miscreants.

Yes… two miscreants in the city have been making fool to the omen who are having jewelleries as the disguised themselves as police. They will be compelled you to pack your golds and ran away with those valuables.

This type of cases are very common in the city where no much cases have been registered in the police station due to the ignorance of the police officials. Even though four cases have been registered in Jayanagar Police Station. The same incident had occurred near Usha Nursing Home on Wednesday night.

Fortunately, the golds had been protected of the courage of two gentlemen in a hotel nearby the nursing home. The police have been finding them. The miscreants are yet to be find.

The same miscreants again cheated a women near Oxford School. They eloped with golds which worth Rs 25,000. Therefore the house are hereby requested to be careful if anybody call as police. Please shout
for help.

The real police might have been sleeping. You have to protect yourself and your valuables!

• Vijay Times and its sister paper, Vijay Karnataka, were bought by The Times of India group in 2006. Vijay Times ceased publication on June 7, 2007. It was replaced by Bangalore Mirror.

"A good copy editor is a reporter’s best friend"

The role of the copy editor in the newsroom remains an adversarial one. There’s no getting round that; copy editing requires critical analysis of other people’s work. It can lead to tension. Smart leaders try to defuse that tension and foster constructive relationships among groups of journalists. They correctly point out that a good copy editor is a reporter’s best friend — someone who will head off mistakes, is a trusted sounding board for risk-taking writing, and burnishes the reporter’s copy with headlines that invite the reader. Improving relationships between copy editors and the rest of the newsroom needs to be an important factor in our deliberations.

— From "Copy Editors: Journalism’s Interior Linemen", a tribute by Gene Foreman, who was the deputy editor and vice president of the Philadelphia Inquirer when he wrote this piece for Poynter.org in August 2002.

• Also read: "What it means to be a newspaper sub" and "Why subs are the lifeblood of a news organisation".

Top 10 reasons why EDITING is cool

(10) It's like solving a puzzle.

(9)  You find a whole world of other people who go crazy over the "10 items or less" sign in the grocery store. (Or, as one new editor put it, "I can constructively satisfy my obsessive-compulsive anal-retentive
tendencies and get paid for it.")

(8)  Your job changes constantly; you're never bored.

(7)  You become a more interesting person. You can talk about Arafat, Albright, Agassi or Aguilera and sound like you know what you're talking about — because you do.

(6)  You have responsibility and power. You decide how readers will perceive the news, how they'll perceive the world.

(5)  Catching a dumb mistake before readers see it is a rush. Helping someone make a story better is the best drug there is.(Or, as one person wrote, "It's as close as an English major can come to being a doctor, or God.")

(4) Newspapers never ask writers to edit, but they love it if editors write.

(3)  You could be the world's best quiz show contestant because you're a dictionary of useless information.

(2)  You can move anywhere and find a job.

(1)  You never have to wear decent clothes.

• Compiled by Jane Harrigan, University of New Hampshire (Courtesy The American Copy Editors' Society)

• Also read: Why subs, or copy editors, are the lifeblood of a news organisation.

Why subs, or copy editors, are the lifeblood of a news organisation

Few readers, perhaps, know of the existence of subs, who play a crucial role in newspaper production. It is the sub-editor, now also known as the copy editor (an American term), who has read every word of every news report on the pages he or she has worked on. It is the sub who has, more or less, decided what the pages should look like. It is the sub who has, more or less, chosen the pictures on the page and written all the headlines, standfirsts, and captions. So when there are typos and other errors on the page it is probably because the sub has fallen asleep on the job and there is no second line of defence.

No second line of defence unlike in the olden days when there were teams of proofreaders to go through every galley proof and every page to catch the slip-ups.

I began my career in the olden days — June 1981, to be exact — as a trainee sub with Mid Day in Mumbai. I loved what I did then at the News Desk, and I continued to love what I did (and doing what I loved) for the next 20 years and more before turning to teaching (my life now is not only full but fulfilling).

Not many young people want to be subs now, though. That is one reason why good subs are rare.

And because they are rare, good subs are worth their weight in gold, which is why I tell all my journalism students to think seriously about desk jobs because newspapers all over the country are in dire need of subs...

• who have traditional subbing skills
• are excellent at spelling and grammar
• are good at rewrites and converting to house style
• are capable of coming up with great headlines, standfirsts, and captions
• are generally computer-literate but experts at layout using QuarkXpress (or equivalent page-making software), with management skills and the expertise to oversee the entire production process from raw copy to final pages.

MERRILL PERLMAN

Those are the basic skills of a good sub. But that's not all you need to be a good sub. Let Merrill Perlman, former director of Copy Desks at The New York Times, explain in detail what copy editors do. In a "Talk to the Times" column, she was asked this question by a reader, Bill Fischer:

Does your job and that of the other desk copy editors entail substantive editing and rewrite or is it mostly a matter of cleaning up style, grammar, etc.?

Here is Perlman's illuminating response:

Thanks for walking into our trap, Bill, and allowing me to explain what our copy editors do.

Copy editors are the final gatekeepers before an article reaches you, the reader. To start with, they want to be sure that the spelling and grammar are correct, following our stylebook, of course. But they also want to be sure that they, and thus you the reader, aren't left with a sense that they've come into the middle of a movie, or that they don't understand how something works, or that they're wondering what comes next or what this development means for them, er, you.

They have great instincts for sniffing out suspicious or incorrect facts or things that just don't make sense in context.

They are also our final line of protection against libel, unfairness and imbalance in an article. If they stumble over anything, they're going to work with the writer or the assigning editor (we call them backfield editors) to make adjustments so you don't stumble. That often involves intensive substantive work on an article.

In addition, copy editors write the headlines, captions and other display elements for the articles, edit the article for the space available to it (that usually means trims, for the printed paper) and read the proofs of the printed pages in case something slipped by.

All of this, I might add, is done under crushing deadlines. For breaking news, a copy editor may have less than an hour to read 1,000 words and do everything the article needs. (It can be even less!) We like to get longer articles farther ahead of time, when we can spend a few hours or even a day to be sure it's perfect, but our goal is to get the information TO you, not keep it FROM you, so speed is of the essence.

We've got more than 150 copy editors here — in fact, it's the largest newsroom department — on 14 different copy desks, just about one desk for every section of the news report.

Now you know why subs, or copy editors, are the lifeblood of a newspaper.

(That last paragraph about the NYT's 150 copy editors may draw gasps of disbelief from subs at Indian newspapers, which are known not to employ more than a handful of subs in each shift.)

Merrill Perlman addresses many other important issues related to the operations of the News Desk. Read the Q&A in its entirety here. Study especially the questions and responses given in the two items headlined "Those Pesky Possessives" and "The Comma Before the And". Learning can be so much fun when the teacher has such a great sense of humour.

• Check the spelling, grammar, punctuation, and facts. Then the sub-editor's real work starts, says Andy Bodle on The Guardian's "Mind Your Language" blog. Read his engaging and entertaining post here: "Isn't there a computer program for that?"

• ALSO READ: What happens when subs fall asleep on the job.