The Copydesk
The newspaper’s staff reporters have been busy, too, and the newspaper’s correspondents, some professional and some very amateur, have been dictating on the telephone; and all that, too, comes as ‘copy’ to the same focal point.
This news-gathering is a prodigious if familiar achievement; so is the multiplication of the message by the rotary machines. But the selection, condensation and presentation of the flood of news, which must occur before a line of type is finalised or a press can turn, is less well understood.
It is the work of men and women with bewildering titles; in the larger newspapers there are as many potentates as in Old Baghdad. But essentially it is the work of the copydesk, of copyreaders or copy-editors in the United States, and sub-editors in many guises in Britain and elsewhere. These production journalists, humble and exalted, work in private. Everybody knows about reporters. They have the excitement of being on the spot at banquets and world series and conventions and coronations (and they have hours of frustration, too, on false scents). But few of the public know anything about the copydesk, the creative fulcrum of the modern newspaper.
This concentrated huddle of checkers and revisers at their terminals conveys nothing of the responsibilities and romance of the work. These are the human sieves of the torrent of news. They make the judgments, they prepare the written word for conversion into mass reproduction, and they, by their choices and presentation, fashion the identity of a newspaper.
Simply in volume, this can be a stupendous task. The New York Times receives two million words on an average day. It publishes 185,000. When they appear as the New York Times, they have been transformed from mere words on a computer screen. They have become, in that newspaper’s assessment, the most important words in the world. They have been fished expertly from the erratic torrent, weighed, assessed, revalued in the light of later catches, and finally prepared for public display in a setting which, hopefully, will exactly reflect their significance. More than 1.8 million words have been discarded, most rejected as complete stories, many rejected as paragraphs, some excised a word at a time. It is this process of scrutiny and then of presentation which every day creates the New York Times and every other newspaper, and the skills it requires are the subject of this book.
They are skills of editing and revision. They cannot create a newspaper which does not have a flow of news, but their absence can ruin a newspaper however good the flow. Titles and procedures change from country to country; standards of judgment change from newspaper to newspaper. But the skills required are the same whether the newspaper is grounded in high politics or low farce. All newspapers are born from a process of editorial selection, text editing and presentation. It may be well done or badly done, but done it must be. Words have to be read and assessed, types assigned, pictures selected, headlines written, news and entertainment organised in time for it to be printed and in forms that people will read.
Of course there is no universal agreement about the details of this craft of newspaper-making, or the way the basic skills should be acquired. Almost all copy-editors begin as reporters and want to come in from the rain or see the desk as the route to an editorship. It is assumed that the copydesk skills are transferable and to some extent they are. Good clear English is the stock-in-trade for newspapers and broadcasting. But there are excellent gatherers of news who have trouble organising a story, or collating one from several different sources, or compressing the excitements they have experienced into half a column. Compression is the antithesis of reporting. How is it best to learn? Most copy-editors would probably declare themselves graduates of the College of Osmosis. They sat around a newsroom long enough to absorb the essentials. The philosophy of this little book is that there are some principles and that these can be passed on more quickly or, at least, passed on after a few arguments.
The Text Editor
The first task must be to define the area of craft under discussion and the journalistic roles. Editing a newspaper or producing a news broadcast is team work; journalists can play different bits of different roles and there is no common international term for the basic one of text editing. In Britain the text editor is a ‘sub-editor’ who ‘subs’ copy; there may be twenty or thirty sub-editors on a newspaper. In the United States the text editor is a ‘copyreader’, and the same work luxuriates under other titles elsewhere. The term ‘text editing’ will be used in this book and the journalist who does it will be called a ‘text editor’.
The text editor’s work begins after stories have been selected for publication or broadcast. There are minor variations here. Some offices have separate teams editing home and foreign news or home and business sections. American dailies often divide the editing functions between national and foreign news from the agencies and city copy which is produced locally and often edited at the city (i.e. local) desk by the city editor or assistant city editor. ‘Give me rewrite!’ is still a valid command from ‘Front Page’. Often enough in one issue of a paper the same name will occur in a byline, shared with others, on a fire in Brooklyn, a road accident in Manhattan, the Mayor’s latest row, a graduation ceremony. He’s been everywhere! Actually, he hasn’t been anywhere. He (or she) shares the byline by virtue of having been nowhere but the newsroom.
Rewrite journalists may have earned a share of the byline because they have simply recast the language of the story; they may have elicited some of the information by prodding the reporter or using their computer to search for back-up data. They are most useful when reporters are filing in haste from several sources. Rewrite pulls it all together. Whatever the variation between different newspapers, the important thing is that in all systems the three stages of selection, presentation and detailed editing have to be organised, and all the advantages of division of labour accrue from appointing one specialist to select copy.
The Copy-taster
On a one-section paper of moderate size (say up to 24 broadsheet pages) one person can select news from several agencies and staff. On a multi-sectioned newspaper, especially one with specialist sections, there may have to be specialist selectors (e.g. five separate copydesks for foreign, national, metropolitan, sport and business).
There is no better title for this work than the British one of ‘copy-taster’: the old name perfectly describes the work. Copy-tasters must have a sensitive news palate. They savour all the news. On a big daily newspaper they will have to make a thousand snap rejections. Of course they cannot read every one of the hundreds of thousands of words that come at them. They skim the copy and because they are up to the minute with the news and in tune with the wants of their newspaper and its readers they can detect, at a taste, what is suitable. They are like professional wine-tasters. They do not have to drink the whole bottle; a tablespoonful or the mere bouquet will do to declare whether it is palatable for that particular paper at that particular moment.
The copy-taster rejects or ‘spikes’ what is not required. In days gone by the rejected material was quite literally impaled on the basic tool of the trade –a sharp metal spike. Nowadays the term ‘spiked’ means it has gone into electronic trash. Rejected copy that is ‘dead’ in one office may, of course, be very much alive in another office: the rescued cat-up-a-tree rejected on the serious daily but lovingly rescued from the flood on the popular paper. Copy-tasters will tell the news department when they detect a potentially good local angle in a few lines of a national report. They may give out short paragraph fillers to text editors for editing. They may do some text editing themselves when it is quiet. But their basic job is preliminary selection, and what they select is normally passed to another executive journalist, a chief sub-editor or a foreign editor; let us call them ‘projection editors’.
The Projection Editor
Here is the pivot of the whole operation. It is the projection editor’s job to refine the process of selection by deciding an order of priorities and expressing them with space and type and illustration. Projection editors may ac
t alone or they may consult a galaxy of senior executives and designers, but their basic task is judicial projection. Should this story be allowed to run to a column of type on page one, or is it really a rather windy message which can be edited down to a quarter of a column? Should it be on the front page at all? Should it be discarded entirely, perhaps, so as to make a great deal of space for that picture? Which of all the possibilities tells the day’s news most effectively?
On a big evening newspaper projection editors (whatever the title) have to make such decisions at great speed. They have to be able to visualise the effect of combinations of type and pictures in various permutations and sizes. There is no time to experiment. They also have to plan their pages before all the copy for them has been received. The copy-taster may have offered, say, a follow-up of the morning story on another around-the-world hot-air balloon attempt, a strong speech on interest rates by a Government minister, a store fire, storms on the coast, and the appearance in court of two men accused of shooting a policeman. How much and which page and with what display? The projection editor also knows that soon a decision will have to be made, in consultation with the editor, on what will be the leading story for the front page. What will it be? The projection editor knows that in ten minutes the court will be hearing the case of the shot policeman but not much copy can be expected for half an hour. However, there are two other interesting items due to start then, according to the day’s news schedule. The French President is to speak at a European conference in Brussels. There is a press conference on pay for nurses.
Projection editors have to look ahead and gauge the pressures on precious space even before the copy-taster has received this other news. Will the President say anything new? How much space should be set aside on page one? As they make their judgment, projection editors plan each story on to each page grid on the screen. They have to decide the headline type, the length of the story, and the type it will be set in. Before the page is complete all the copy has to be processed in accordance with the projection editor’s prescriptions. It has to go to the text editors, who are the link between the projection editor’s imagination and the mechanics of printing.
The text editor will do all or most of these things for every story:
Write the headline which first attracts the reader’s attention, and the subheadings
Read the story for clarity and meaning and rewrite where necessary
Shorten the story while retaining essential facts, unity and coherence
Combine one story with another, or perhaps combine running reports from several news agencies, a handful of correspondents and half a dozen reporters, to produce a single, intelligible report from a series of confused and even contradictory messages
Add important background facts and provide answers for any implied questions
Save space where verbosity creeps in (where there is a capacity for implementation the text editor prefers to know what can be done)
Correct the grammar
Check for apparent errors of fact
Check for legal errors (libel, restricted reporting, contempt of court)
Check for taste
Check for house (i.e. office) style
The Revise Editor
Once the text editor has completed these tasks, the copy is often passed to a third executive, the ‘revise editor’. Revise editors check the work, ensuring that every detail is correct: simple mistakes can wreck any production scheme and make the whole page late. Revise editors also regard themselves as guinea pigs for the meaning of the language, especially the headline written by the text editor: does it make immediate sense, or has it grown from obscure references to some dream world inhabited by reporter or text editor? American newspapers often dispense with a revise editor and suffer as a consequence in wordiness.
Standards in Editing
All this work has to be done on every newspaper. The text editor is not a mere corrector of the press or a précis writer. There are, it is true, grades of creativity. Speed is valued more than polish on some newspapers. On a busy evening newspaper the text editors will at times find stories arriving far faster than they can edit them. There is little time for polish. They concentrate on the right length, the right news point and the headline, and then get on to the next story. In Britain the text editor on a serious newspaper employing specialist staff writers will be expected to do less than on a popular newspaper. But all British text editors are expected to do more than the American copyreader, who is more of a reader and less of an editor. The skills of condensation are but poorly developed in the United States and Canada. If North American reporters wrote concisely it would matter less, but they do not, and the absence of strict editing leads to wasted space and muffled meaning.
This is not just a matter of saving column-inches; on American newspapers whole columns could be saved every day and used for news, pictures or advertising revenue. The inefficiency and waste are extraordinary.
By contrast, thanks probably to the effect of wartime newsprint rationing fusing with historical development, the British sub-editor is first and foremost expected to be a concise editor; to be described as a tight sub is not a sign of moral turpitude. A good sub-editor takes pride in being able to convert into half a column a report that would take a column if printed as received – and to do so without losing a single relevant fact or straining a meaning. Of course this is skilful work and it has its perils; it runs the risk of distortion when done too hurriedly or unintelligently, and can lead to the savaging of distinctive individual writing which ought really to be used wholly or not at all.
Even the most rudimentary text-editing, however, is better than another all-too-common American practice of shortening agency messages merely by discarding, unread, the last two sheets. In not attempting to edit news dispatches by the word, two assumptions are made. The first is that the portion selected by length for publication is the most important – that the reporter has assembled the most important facts at the beginning of the report. The second assumption is that the portion chosen for publication is incapable of accurate condensation by a specialist in précis. These assumptions are only rarely justified; more often they are ill-founded and even dangerous. Trained reporters will know, of course, that they should write economically, that they should include the most important facts at the beginning of a normal news message, and a news-agency report will have had the benefit of some rough editing at the agency’s headquarters. However, several things are overlooked in this reasoning. The news agency, for instance, has the task of supplying news to a vast assortment of newspapers with varying needs and space. The fuller narrative treatment suitable for a big paper interested in the report will be wrong for another paper with less space or less interest in the subject. Secondly, there are many occasions when the best report is obtained by combining key facts from more than one source.
Command of the language is, in fact, the second quality required from a text editor. The first is a sense of news values. Both can be cultivated. Text editors need not be ‘writing’ journalists. They need not be capable of a single act of imaginative prose. They should be a good judge of writing in others and should develop a style themselves, a clear, muscular and colloquial style. They need not be good reporters themselves, and although it can help to have done some reporting, many a journalist has failed as a reporter but succeeded as a text editor. A young man on the Manchester Evening News was found painfully shy for the reporters’ room; he transferred to sub-editing. As Sir William Haley he later became editor of The Times of London.
News values vary from paper to paper. Text editors should study various kinds of newspaper and their selection and treatment of news between the serious and the human interest. They should re-edit the day’s Times as if it were the Sun. They should be able to adapt themselves, as craftsmen, to the standards of either. A wide general curiosity is vital, preferably backed by a broad education. Anyone who is bored by current people and politics will never make a successful ge
neral text editor. Of course a university degree can help, but mainly because of the intellectual discipline that lies behind it. There is no need for non-graduates to feel out of the race, especially if they have any distinctive aptitude for lucidity, any passion for accuracy, any flair for design, any sense of news values, and above all, a willingness to learn.
What Makes a Good Text Editor?
The other qualities required in the text editor are the same as those listed two generations ago by F.J. Mansfield in his Sub-editing (London: Pitman, 1939). They make a formidable list, but before anyone flinches it has to be said that all text editors are not expected to possess all these attributes to perfection. To possess some in high degree may be enough for success. Even within specialised text-editing there is room for specialisation; and a good copydesk will blend the different talents of text editors, relying now on the capacity for quick précis by one member and now on another’s ability slowly to add sparkle to the dullest text. The qualities collectively are:
The ‘human interest’ qualities of sympathy, insight, breadth of view, imagination, sense of humour
An orderly and well-balanced mind, which implies level judgment, sense of perspective and proportion
A cool head, ability to work in an atmosphere of hurry and excitement without becoming flurried or incapable of accurate work
Quickness of thought coupled with accuracy
Essential English Page 2
