"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".

When a writer spews venom at subs

GILES COREN

A majority of writers are philosophical about the changes subs make in their copy, but some writers go ballistic when that happens, and Giles Coren, the restaurant critic of The Times, falls in that category.

Read the letter he sent to the Times subs — he was furious because the indefinite article 'a' was excised from the last sentence of his article. Be warned: The email is awash with four-letter words and is not for the faint-hearted.

Here's a "clean" excerpt, one of the few paragraphs not littered with obscenities:

It strips me of all confidence in writing for the magazine. No exaggeration. i've got a review to write this morning and i really don't feel like doing it, for fear that some nuance is going to be removed from the final line, the pay-off, and i'm going to have another weekend ruined for me.

When I was a journalist, I was always a Desk-man (and proud of it) — never have I had an encounter with anyone as severe on subs as Giles Coren. I have to say, though, that while I don't condone his foul-mouthedness and while I hold no brief for his verbosity in that letter, my sympathies are with him. I would not have deleted that 'a'.

This was not the first time Coren was taking on the Times subs. He had lashed out at them in 2002 for changing "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" to "...jumps over a lazy dog".

Another fairly "clean" excerpt from that email:

never ever ask me to write something for you. and don't pay me. i'd rather take 400 quid for assassinating a crack whore's only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal — my integrity would be less compromised.

LAURA BARTON

Laura Barton gives us the writers' viewpoint on the Coren controversy in her column in The Guardian. An excerpt:

There is, it must be said, something of a long-standing tension between writers and subeditors. We writers are rather protective of our words, prone to filing late and flouncing about and are altogether a tad precious. In short, subeditors view us as the Little Lord Fauntleroys of the office, and we in turn view them as our evil nemeses, hellbent on our undoing.

So while half of Fleet Street undoubtedly thought Coren a proper wazzock for his outpouring this week, there were at least some of us who sympathised somewhat. Most of us, at one point or another, have mentally drafted what we shall henceforth refer to as a "Corenian" letter, but never quite found the chutzpah required to actually send it.

DAVID MARSH

And, to get an insight into a sub's emotions when faced with a tirade of Corenian proportions, read the response of The Guardian's David Marsh: "Excoriating the coruscating Coren". Here's the intro:

If only Giles Coren had given his email to a good subeditor before sending it, he might have got his point across effectively without revealing himself to be arrogant, petulant, pompous and, frankly, the last person you'd want to be stuck in a restaurant with.

And then Marsh takes on his colleague Laura Barton for the piece in which she defended Coren:

Even those we regard as friends can damn with (very) faint praise. Lauding Coren because "you've taken one for the [writing] team," one of my colleagues describes in today's Guardian how she sees a sub's job: "A subeditor sets [an article] out on the page, cuts the words to fit, checks for spelling and grammatical errors, wanton cursing and factual inaccuracies." Perhaps she didn't have space to mention the coruscating headline-writing skills, visual flair, compendious knowledge and ability to turn sows' ears into silk purses on a daily basis that makes the subeditors who put together the very section that she writes for one of the most brilliant journalistic teams in the business.

All good subs will be able to relate to this accurate description of what a sub brings to the table.

And the final reaction, this time from the Sunday Times sub-editors.

An excerpt:

There was a sharp intake of breath when your e-mail hit the inbox of subs throughout the industry this week — that was after we'd stopped laughing. Not that we didn't think you had a point. Yes, tinkering with copy just for the sake of it and without consultation is wrong. It is disrespectful and arrogant. And we can see why you'd be furious at the loss even of an indefinite article.

There is nothing more irritating than a sub-editor who thinks they know better than a writer, particularly one who cares deeply about his work. But did you really have to be so rude?

Read the measured response in its entirety here: "Sunday Times subeditors reply to Giles Coren".