Tag Archives: copy editing

Wash Post ombud links loss of copy editors to increase in errors

July 7, 2009 – 8:00 am

washpost4Just over two years ago, the public editor of the Orlando Sentinel wrote a column alerting readers to the fact that the paper had experienced a spike in the number of corrections. He was clear about the cause of the increased errors:

When the Sentinel tightened its financial belt back in June, it lost a wealth of seasoned veterans, many of them editors. Those journalists not only wrote headlines and captions. They also scrutinized the work of reporters — correcting spelling, straightening out syntax, double-checking facts — before publication.
With fewer people to do that now, less of that important work gets done, and the result is more published errors.

Yesterday, the ombudsman of the Washington Post wrote basically the same column:

…Growing numbers of readers are contacting the ombudsman to complain about typos and small errors.

"As a virtually lifelong subscriber, I am disheartened by the increasingly poor quality of the editing of The Post," wrote Richard Murphy of Alexandria. If typos can’t be caught by a spell-checker, "then The Post should restore a couple of copy editor positions. You have cut that staff too much."

The Post’s copy editors are among the best I’ve worked with during nearly four decades in the newspaper business. But they’ve been badly depleted by staff cuts as the money-losing paper struggles to control costs. Those who remain are stretched thin while The Post expands to a 24-hour news operation in print and online.

Between early 2005 and mid-2008, the number of full-time copy editors dropped from about 75 to 43 through buyouts or voluntary departures. It has declined further since then, but Post managers won’t provide precise figures beyond saying that six took a recent buyout offer. The need is so critical that most are being hired back on contract through at least the end of the year, and part-timers are taking up some of the slack.

Copy editors are the unsung heroes of newsrooms. Unknown to the public, and often underappreciated by their colleagues, they’re the last line of defense against a correction or, worse, a libel suit…

"By definition, you’ll see more errors when there’s reduced staffing," said Bill Walsh, the A-section copy desk chief. On a typical weeknight a few years ago, Walsh said, the three copy desks handling national, foreign and business news could rely on perhaps 20 editors. Those desks have since been combined into one desk, headed by Walsh. Today, he said, "there are some shifts where I’m looking at seven or eight people total."…

These papers are by no means the only ones experiencing a spike in errors due to the loss of bodies on the copy desk. Adding to the problem is the fact that the move online means papers are churning out more content than ever before. Yet copy editors — and magazine fact checkers — are being shown the door.

Carl Sessions Stepp examined how some newsrooms are coping with this challenge is his recent article, "The Quality-Control Quandary,” It’s a must-read. I fear, though, that few organizations are rethinking their quality control process and means of verification. They’re just trying to do more with less. It’s a recipe for disaster.

I looked at this issue in a recent essay I wrote for Harvard’s Niemen Neiman Reports:

For more than 100 years, one of the most recognizable slogans in journalism has been “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Lately, The New York Times motto is being challenged by the familiar phrase, “do more with less.” This new saying was, in fact, the theme of the World Editors Forum scheduled for March, but the event had to be cancelled “due to the impact of the global financial downturn on newspaper companies.”

News organizations are shedding employees. Those that remain are expected to pick up the slack and also push ahead with digital initiatives. Included in the exodus are valuable copyeditors—the people in whose encyclopedic brains reside a lot of what prevents errors from surfacing in stories. The few, the proud—and disappearing—magazine fact checkers are also being told to grab their World Almanacs and Book of Facts and move along.

Accuracy is a huge journalistic challenge. When reporters are asked to take on more work while the newsroom’s same fallible processes and error-prone technologies remain in place, the result will undoubtedly be a further downward slide in quality. More errors will be followed by more apologies and more corrections. And this is happening at a critical time for journalism—a time when consumers are being asked by journalists using digital media to lend support to their newsgathering mission…

 

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Behind the scenes, Newspapers, Ombudsmen | Also tagged , , , , | Comments

You Don’t Say: Daddy, where do corrections come from?

June 18, 2009 – 8:00 am

This post marks the debut of You Don’t Say, a new column by John McIntyre for Regret the Error. John, a newspaper copy editor for 30 years, oversaw The Baltimore Sun’s copy desk from 1995 to 2009. He has taught copy editing at Loyola of Maryland since 1995, and he has conducted workshops on writing and editing at more than two dozen publications and professional organizations in the United States and Canada. On this site, John will bring a copy editor’s perspective to errors, accuracy and corrections. You can follow his blog on editing and related subjects, You Don’t Say. He can also be found on Facebook and on Twitter as @johnemcintyre.

By John E. McIntyre

Not everything that is wrong merits public correction.

It would be extremely unusual, for example, for a newspaper, magazine, or Web site to run a formal correction for an error in grammar or English usage, or for a typographical error, though there are exceptions, as when 24 Hours quoted a councilman as saying that the costs of a tunnel were “now being lowballed” instead of “not being lowballed.” Such lapses are dealt with, if at all, in in-house newsletters or memos, of which Philip B. Corbett’s excellent After Deadline at The New York Times website is an example.  

Formal corrections, such as those aggregated on this site, almost always focus on errors of fact: 

The wrong name for a person or organization — The New York Times has admitted to getting Procter and Gamble’s name wrong as Proctor and Gamble more than 100 times.  

Erroneous statistics — The Toronto Star published in May that 1,700 wind turbines are in operation in Europe; the number is about 74,000. Also in May, the paper estimated the cost or a new nuclear plant as $7,000 per megawatt of installed capacity, but the correct number is $7,000 per kilowatt. Distinguishing between mega and kilo, like the distinction between million and billion, is a hazard for mathematically impaired journalists. 

Bungled photo captions — The Washington Times ran a photo of the Obama children to illustrate an article about homicides of children in Chicago.

Recipes — You might not want to attempt any published recipe until, say, five days or a week past publication. The Hamilton Spectator ran a recipe for a ginger cake during Celiac Awareness Month than called for two cups of penne pasta instead of two cups of rice pasta.   

Popular culture — The Guardian’s  review of the latest Star Trek movie referred to a character as a Klingon rather than a Romulan, and the Los Angeles Times referred to the character as Captain Nemo instead of Captain Nero.

Wrong word — The New York Times quoted Rep. Anthony D. Weiner as saying, “You’ll forgive some of my constituents for wanting to get into the fetal poison and bathe in Purell.” He said “fetal position.”  

And more, such as people who are very much alive being reported as dead.  

But not even every error of fact winds up being corrected. When errors are identified, a responsible editor or small group of editors will determine whether they are significant enough to merit formal notice. How many minor errors of fact pass unnoticed is not easy to determine. But published corrections almost always follow when a reader complains of an error.

Sometimes a publication decides to run a clarification rather than a correction, in contexts in which the published statement of fact was technically accurate but lacked some nuance of wording or additional detail and therefore permitted a misreading.  

And in the free-for-all word of electronic publishing, some Web sites do not commonly publish corrections at all, instead updating the published articles with silent corrections as the day wears on. Bloggers, or at least the responsible ones, will authorize readers’ corrections through comments and will also apologize for errors in comments or subsequent posts. But the practice on the Web has not yet standardized.  

One thing that the Internet has beneficially fostered is the proliferation of apologies for plagiarisms and fabrication. The ease of theft through copying and pasting electronic texts is matched only by the ease of detection of such theft. And with bloggers and other commentators quick to jump on any publication detected in apparent jiggery-pokery — such as Maureen Dowd’s recent appropriation of a passage from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo — it becomes difficult for a publication to deal quietly and privately with these matters.

By jmcintyre | Posted in You Don't Say | Comments