What is the future of the copy editor?
Do copy editors have a future in journalism?
Will that role be drastically changing? Traditionally, copy editors at most newspapers had to do more than just edit copy. They also had to do page layout, fit stories to fixed spaces, write headlines, write captions, etc. Obviously, page layout is not needed on the Web, and every beat blogger should understand SEO for headline writing. And it might make sense to replace most captions with tags.
Don’t get me started on fitting stories to space either. That skill is dead. Stories on the Web should be as long or as short as they need to be. Copy editors no longer need to spend hours trying to fit a 15-inch story in an 8-inch space.
Every journalism company should have some copy editors, but the era of copy editors heavily rewriting content is over. News organizations can no longer afford to have employees whose main job is to fix the mistakes of other employees. It’s one thing to polish work, but another thing entirely to redo it.
Every beat blogger and online reporter will have to know how to write clean copy. It’s still a wise idea to have copy editors, however, but what will their other duties be?
Maximizing headline SEO? Audio and video post production? Making sure content is properly tagged?
August 18th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
I’m not sure you entirely understand the role of a copy editor. My experience with copy editors is that they don’t do heavy re-writing; such work, if needed, is done by section and assignment editors. What they do is ensure that stories conform to a consistent style, make them clearer, more readable and free of obvious errors. Perhaps your own copy has given you a different perspective of copy editors, but it’s not the most accurate one.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
What size papers are you talking about here? I think that’s important to clarify.
You have worked at much larger papers than me, where copy editors often specialize a lot more. My biggest experience with copy editors comes from living with one. She tells me stories all the time about people’s poor copy. When she worked at a 50,000-circulation, Gannett-owned daily, she routinely rewrote a lot of copy.
I do agree that often copy editors spend a lot of their time on clarity and style, but that’s not always the case. I’m willing to bet that the reporters at The New York Times write pretty clean copy. I’m also willing to bet that reporters at your paper write cleaner copy than most reporters.
August 18th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
If it’s important to clarify, then perhaps you could have done so in your original post (maybe something for your copy editor). I’ve worked at smaller places, too; CQ’s circulation numbers in the low thousands, for example, and they performed duties similar to what I described. But if it’s copy quality that’s the issue, it’s hard to see how that makes copy editors *less* valuable or lead you to ask if they have a future in journalism.
August 18th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
A copy editor might have caught this error: Stories on the Web should be as long or as short as they need to do.
August 18th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
As a former designer/copy editor at a 50k paper and a 125k paper, I would say that my work definitely fell more within the tasks that Derek described than rewriting whole stories, which rarely happened. As much as possible, we tried to avoid rewriting big chunks of the story because we wanted to preserve the writer’s voice. The handful of times that I had to rewrite big passages were occasions where it would have been an embarrassment to the paper and the writer to have the story appear in its original form.
As for copy editors’ usefulness in the future of journalism, I see it this way: Of the things that copy editors currently do, their most important roles — and really the main reason for the existence of copy editors in a newsroom — are those involved in quality control, such as proofreading and fact-checking. The need for that doesn’t diminish when you move online (and perhaps even increases as the 24-7 constant updates would necessitate quicker turnaround of content, increasing the likelihood of errors).
If copy editors become irrelevant, I think it would be due to one of two things: Either reporters have improved their quality of writing to the point where a second read is no longer necessary (not likely if reporters are actually going to spend most of their time reporting), or technology has been invented that automates the quality control functions of copy editors (not likely anytime soon).
August 18th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Let me try to steer this topic back into the direction I intended (and maybe didn’t get across well enough).
What roles will a copy editor fulfill in the coming years? Most copy editors do more than just edit copy. What will those other roles be on the Web?
And will we see less copy editors in the future? The reason why I ask if copy editors are still relevant largely has to do with money. Newspapers are laying off copy editors and asking the remaining copy editors to edit more copy. To me, this means that journalism companies will have to insist that writers write cleaner and conform to style.
Page layout is a big duty for many copy editors. This is not a skill that transfers to the Web. What will that time be replaced with? Editing more copy?
August 18th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
I have to back up John on this one. The main function of a copy editor is quality control, and it would be stupid for companies to skimp on those duties. Readers of the print or online version of the paper expect at certain level of accuracy of grammar and facts.
At your typical mid-size/metro paper, copy editors don’t touch layout at all, so they’ll just edit more copy on the Web. Blogs are in dire need of editors like any other kind of writing.
August 18th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
I think we would indeed see fewer copy editors, in part b/c the new media landscape would dictate it, and in part because, once newspapers migrate completely to online, the loss of the pagination responsibilities would mean that each copy editor would be able to edit more stories. Also, as media companies become increasingly local-oriented, and once the need to fill a print product of a predetermined size is gone, there will be little/no need to spend manpower editing wire stories.
As for new additional responsibilities, I can see the copy editors taking on a lot of the community-building functions: moderating comments, audience interaction, finding and linking to relevant outside sources, and getting your content out to more corners of the Web by participating in relevant online communities and pointing back to your content from those sites. I can also see them teaming up with reporters to research stories. I think that could be a particularly helpful function b/c it can help bring the “forest” to the story while a beat reporter’s efforts focus on “the trees”, per se.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:09 am
Copy editors moving from print to online already have some opportunities.
Aside from fact-checking and editing blog posts/breaking news (already mentioned), Web copy editors could upgrade photo gallery cutlines and rewrite wire cutlines, two things with some of the most mangled grammar in journalism. (No offense to my photographer friends; their skills are apparent in many other arenas.)
It would be great to see copy editors take on some of the roles John Zhu described above (heck, everyone should help out), though I wonder if it would take work away from webmasters, line editors, marketers and other established online personnel. (Or is there enough work to go around?)
I wonder if the true question is not “Will there be work for copy editors?”, but “Will media companies realize copy editors’ value, and have sufficient funds to pay them?”
August 19th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Well, until this past April, I was a copy editor/paginator/graphics person at my 25,000-circ. daily. Our company decided to create a new position, Web editor, and I jumped at the chance.
I’m using my editing skills to edit content before it’s posted. I’m working on learning Flash, and hope to use my graphics skills to create online graphics. I’m learning video and audio editing. I’m also fulfilling some of the community involvement aspects that John mentioned.
Now, granted, I jumped at this chance to learn new skills because I’m just at the beginning of my career and hope to have a long future. But I see no reason why my fellow copy editors, young and old, wouldn’t have a future involving those sorts of things. It will require some training, but everything new in journalism requires training.
And, as I’m fast finding out, online journalism is so vast and far-reaching, it takes many people to maintain it. I see no reason why some of those people can’t be copy editors/paginators.
One last note: Everyone, even the best reporter in the world, still needs another set of eyes to look over their writing. Even on the web. That is, if you want to stay credible to the general public.
August 19th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
I think copy editors will still have their place editing for correctness and accuracy, as well as still editing captions on photos. But, I also think they will move toward editing blogs, videos, audio as well, especially for smaller newsrooms that don’t have an online editor.