“Those who do not edit do not understand the keen pleasure that comes from taking up a text and leaving it tighter, clearer, and more accurate. Working against deadline provides a structure and a stimulus. And it is far from widely understood how smart and funny copy editors are as a group.”

– John McIntyre, copy desk chief, Baltimore Sun

Read more about John McIntrye and the wonderful world of copy editing here, in the Christian Science Monitor.

Sixty-four percent of the newspapers reported cutting the space given to foreign news over three years, making that the area that has suffered at the most papers as the business contracts. Only 10 percent of the editors said they considered foreign news “very essential” to their papers.

“It’s really concerning when we have two wars overseas, our economy is more global, we’re competing with economies that are growing faster than ours, and our dependence on foreign oil is one of the biggest stories,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Read the full story here.

Forget, for a moment, the practical problems created in some departments — some copy editors, for example, will need to file for monthly mileage expenses to communicate with their designers. Forget, too, how the “reorganization” was first billed as a system in which the continuous news desk would be encircled by rings of designers, then copy editors, then reporters etc, all feeding back to the center and a modern, 21st-century, print/online production team. Now, all of the traditional fiefdoms have been preserved.

Instead, take the coat locker/file drawer/bookcase units. No please, take them. Away. That must be what management heard after they asked us, “What furniture would you like to keep?” And we told them, knowing full well that 1) they didn’t care to really know, and 2) they had already made up their minds. But like Charlie Brown, we placed our trust, however shaky, in Lucy one more time … and then the football was snatched away.

What reason did you hear for the removal of the lockers? Here are three: 1) They’re ugly. 2) There’s not enough room. 3) The bosses can’t see us hiding behind them (obviously, this our favorite). But the answer depended on who you asked. Oh, and who made the decision? That kept changing, too. It’s Chinatown, Jake. What reason were you given?

The truth is that it’s not about the coat lockers; sadly, it’s about us. We are the furniture.

And furniture doesn’t need to be consulted, listened to or respected. It just needs to be moved, or tossed out. Our brothers and sisters in advertising and circulation know this all too well. Now our Post-Dispatch security guards know it, too, and unfortunately they didn’t have the protection of a union contract.

They will be out on the street, treated like furniture tossed to the curb for bulk-item pickup day. They were told they could apply for jobs with Whelan Security — for half of what they make now. And oh, by the way, that 5 weeks vacation time they haven’t used? Well, here’s the thing: It’s not Lee policy to pay unused vacation time.

Furniture.

A colleague who took the buyout six months ago recently discovered that she has no dental coverage. When she called Delta, she was told she had “opted out” when she signed her early retirement papers in September.

“No, I didn’t,” she said.

“Yes, you did, we have a paper with your signature on it.”

“Well, I don’t remember signing it and, besides, I don’t have a copy of it,” she said. “Can you send me a copy?”

Delta said no, they can’t. So our colleague called HR in Davenport and was told the same thing; no copy. No COBRA dental coverage. No recourse except to get your own insurance because, anyway, six months have gone by and it’s too late.

“Is this the way you treat retirees?” our friend asked.

“Well,” the HR lady in Davenport answered, “you Post-Dispatch people are the only retirees we’ve ever had to deal with.” (Presumably because nobody in a nonunion Lee paper felt it was worth sticking around long enough to have a career and retire. But we digress.)

“You Post-Dispatch people.”

You furniture.

I have to kill off e-mail messages that I need for work just so I can continue to get new ones.

When I have a big story, my voicemail rapidly fills up, and other readers can’t leave messages.

Now with this latest newsroom reorganization, they are taking away many of the filing cabinets in the newsroom as well as the tall cabinets where we store our coats.

Some desks are squeezed so close together that you couldn’t possibly have a private conversation with a source, a sweetheart or your doctor. This even though we’ve lost huge numbers of newsroom employees to buyouts.

So we can’t have electronic files, hard copy files, more filled notebooks than we can fit on our desktops — or even coats.

Exactly what does Lee think reporters do?

Speaking of declining revenue, why would Lee lay off people in circulation and advertising, when the company says it wants to grow those two areas? Either management is clueless or Lee is going to outsource the jobs.

In my 30 years in the newsroom at the Post, I’ve encountered some bosses — fortunately, not many — who didn’t care about the contract or their employees. But, largely, employees in the newsroom who work hard are valued. This doesn’t seem to be the case anywhere else in the building (please, Guild members in other departments, correct me if I’m wrong.)

Please everyone stand united in our efforts to ensure that Lee honors the contract. If Lee gets away with this, management here will ignore the rest of the contract, too.

What do you think of Lee’s latest attack on our contract? Sound off in comments!

The Washington Post’s plan to drag the editing process into the 21^st century

To accommodate its online operation and the 24-hour news cycle, the Washington Post is dramatically reshaping how copy is handled, and by whom:

Although Bennett calls [a memo to the staff] “fairly modest,” it calls for dramatic changes in the production of the paper. The plan shifts editing resources to earlier in the day, merges the night National and Foreign copy desks, reroutes the editing of feature stories and nonbreaking enterprise news pieces and projects to daylight hours, and eliminates the bottlenecks that tend to form at the end of the day.

The plan also mandates “fewer touches” on some stories by editors, which will elicit cheers from many Post reporters. They’ve long complained about “drive-by editing” in which editors up and down the chain of command drop into their stories and fiddle with them to the point of destruction. According to the memo, a half-dozen editors routinely make changes on A-section stories, and an internal audit discovered one inside story that 12 different editors changed. …

The reason many newspapers rely so heavily on editors—a reason rarely spoken—is that some reporters can’t write. Their copy isn’t edited as much as it’s rewritten. Bennett has a message for them: “Reporters who can’t write are a dying breed.”

Read the full story here.

A new Harris Interactive poll finds that over half of Americans — 54 percent — say they tend not to trust the press, “with only 30 percent tending to trust the press.” More Americans (41 percent) trust “Internet news and information sites” than they do the mainstream media. Radio tends to do best among Americans as 44 percent say they tend to trust it.

Read the full story here

Publishers need to reset profit goals, say goodbye to 30 percent

Hearst vice chairman Frank Bennack Jr. says publishers have to get realistic about their business, and reset advertising, circulation and profit targets “so we don’t live in a constant state of depression.” He also warns that severe newsroom cutting will come back to haunt publishers. “If newspapers don’t cover the news and do it with detail and context, someone else will.”

Read the full story here

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