Brick

When I’m dri­ving some­where with My Beloved, when (not if) she cor­rects my nav­i­ga­tion, I recall the junior high geom­e­try class phrase “describ­ing the sides of a rec­tan­gle.” The dis­tance and time are roughly the same: My over then down, or her under then up, and there you are, thptpth.

A plus B equals C plus D. … Unless …

This is the feel­ing I had when reread­ing “Den­ver Post, Bay Area News Group Revamp Story Edit­ing with Fewer Copy Edi­tors” by Steve Myers from Poynter’s Lat­est News blog, includ­ing the thptpth raspberry.

Yet, the first time I went through the May 23, 2012, piece I grew as angry as those crit­i­cal of this, such as John E. McIntyre’s Bal­ti­more Sun col­umn, “The Empty Copy Desk.” They’re upset that Edi­tor Greg Moore in Den­ver and Edi­tor Dave But­ler of Bay Area News Group are gut­ting their pub­li­ca­tions’ copy desks, con­tin­u­ing a trend seen else­where in the nation. They’re either keep­ing some copy edi­tors but decen­tral­iz­ing them or los­ing all of them, giv­ing that task to col­leagues, where reporters edit one-another’s work as time permits.

Me, too, until the vague famil­iar­ity crystallized.

First, why more — or fewer — edi­tors: Peri­od­i­cal writ­ers do their thing and their super­vi­sors edit those pieces. But for a good century-and-a-half, that didn’t take care of cor­rect­ing the texts as per­fectly as humanly pos­si­ble. More eyes are needed. The copy desk com­prises two-to-four more edit­ings where flaws in form and con­tent are dis­cov­ered and fixed. Also, you see copy edi­tors in ad agen­cies, mag­a­zines and book pub­lish­ers. Online-only pub­li­ca­tions have copy edi­tors. Big non­prof­its and cor­po­ra­tions employ copy edi­tors in their pub­lic rela­tions divi­sion. In the lat­ter groups, these pro­fes­sion­als may be free-lancers or the copy-editing may be part of another job title.

But if you’re a 21st-century news­pa­per man­ager and have to choose between lay­ing off a con­tent gen­er­a­tor (a reporter) and a con­tent inspec­tor, then you might take your chances and reduce the sec­ondary, to retain the pri­mary. You tell the reporters’ super­vi­sors to be extra care­ful and. yes. read each other’s work. Another option seen in news­pa­per chains is to have a cen­tral copy desk in a hub with sis­ter pub­li­ca­tions send­ing their sto­ries in.

Inevitably, typos and fac­tual errors increase. And, yes, errors did sneak past all the lay­ers of edi­tors in tra­di­tional sys­tems. And they did in your grand­par­ents’ day, too, don’t let any­one tell you dif­fer­ently — check the micro­film or micro­fiche archive at any library.

Greg Moore is reduc­ing his 23-member copy desk to nine. “The Den­ver Post is … mov­ing away from an assembly-line edit­ing process.” Not all are lay­offs, as buy-outs are offered and some are trans­fer­ring within the Post. Those nine, he said, “will become ‘assis­tant edi­tors’ assigned to desks (busi­ness, fea­tures, Metro, sports) through­out the news­room. Each of those desks will oper­ate as ‘self-contained pub­lish­ing units.’”

The Bay Area group, accord­ing to the Poyn­ter arti­cle, is keep­ing the sin­gu­lar copy desk but “reduc­ing the amount of copy edit­ing for rou­tine sto­ries and mov­ing dead­lines up so sto­ries are pub­lished ear­lier in the day.”

The goal for both, the arti­cle says, is that even though more mis­takes will be missed, is “pub­lish­ing sto­ries dur­ing the day when peo­ple are online” rather than post­ing to the web overnight while paper edi­tions are printed and distributed.

Right two blocks, left one block; left two blocks then right one block

On the sec­ond read­ing, “dur­ing the day” hit me. I had writ­ten some­thing par­al­lel as a memo to some­one who since has left the company.

That per­son did con­firm he received it and would study it. Now it’s prob­a­bly buried in the for­mer executive’s shut­tered email queue.

I am claim­ing it back.

This per­son had writ­ten the staff in late Jan­u­ary ask­ing for ideas big and small to save money in the news­room. (The res­ig­na­tion came in late April.)

Here is the memo. I have elided any­thing that might be too reveal­ing, for the sake of this person’s pri­vacy and for me to not risk all of my remain­ing job security.

Prob­lem:

Sav­ing money in the newsroom.

Restated:

Tran­si­tion to a mod­ern, more effi­cient newsroom.

Our news­pa­per has essen­tially a daily cycle. While each [of its two zones] has two print edi­tions, they run about an hour apart, around mid­night. [Our two web­sites], out­side of a few “break­ing news” posts, key from the print edi­tions out at mid­night and post before dawn.

While some U.S. news­pa­pers had an all-day strat­egy — morning-evening or mul­ti­ple cycles such as bull­dog–early afternoon-final — all of them pre­sumed that read­ers ingested each paper once a day. (In the ‘60s, my fam­ily would take the Arkansas Gazette in the morn­ing and also the Fort Smith Times Record, which arrived about when I came home from school.)

It’s not just the Inter­net that has changed most-everything in most ways, but that the audi­ence for jour­nal­ism has dis­cov­ered the enjoy­ment and con­ve­nience of check­ing the news sev­eral times a day.

Mul­ti­ple times daily, con­tem­po­rary news junkies (our most desir­able read­ers) check news sites directly but more often click on links to news in social media, links posted by news junkies who checked online pub­li­ca­tions moments ear­lier. The read­ers are using smart­phones, e-tablets and even their work computers.

[Because of our min­i­mal mid­day post­ings but mainly because our pub­li­ca­tion has a firm pay­wall charg­ing for online access, w]e are let­ting TV and radio sta­tions get away with pro­vid­ing most of these links on Face­book and Twit­ter. (Online pub­li­ca­tions and news­pa­pers both are essen­tially text media.)

Adver­tis­ing.

I under­stand that the suc­cess of ads comes from mul­ti­ple views: The more times I see the shoe store ad the more likely I’ll check it out. How­ever, print and online ads seem to be set up with the pre­sump­tion they’re viewed once a day. But what if we got our key read­ers to check our website(s) mul­ti­ple times a day? More views (not nec­es­sar­ily more “unique vis­i­tors”) should equal more results.

Tan­gent.

They’re all news­pa­pers. Call­ing nytimes.com an online news­pa­per makes no more and no less sense than call­ing time.com an online mag­a­zine. Both update sev­eral times a day. Both con­tinue to have weekly fea­tures — sec­tions, colum­nists etc. The Inter­net com­mu­nity has no com­mon, catchy name for these: The awk­ward but cor­rect “Online Pub­li­ca­tion” and “News Aggre­ga­tor” serve until a catch­phrase takes. My take: They’re all news­pa­pers. The func­tion that washingtonpost.com, newsweek.com and thedailybeast.com all ful­fill is most sim­i­lar to the print-on-paper daily. Jets are still called planes, and plane parts use rail­road ter­mi­nol­ogy, which in turn came from ship jargon.

Solu­tion:

Rather than the cur­rent dom­i­nant print cycle with a mir­ror online cycle, the news staff ought to think of itself as the modern-day ver­sion of an all-day metro paper, with mul­ti­ple edi­tions. In 2012, that means the ear­lier edi­tions are online and the lat­ter are print. Online and print edi­tions would have a nearly equal foot­ing. Print of course would con­tinue to define the “final” edition.

The papers still would run con­tin­u­ing fea­tures on sched­ules. Reporters and pho­tog­ra­phers, though, would file on the ear­li­est prac­ti­cal dead­line. Arti­cles would be edited by the writ­ers’ super­vi­sors and an all-day news copy desk, then posted on the next web­site cycle. Reporters could sub­mit updates or a final ver­sion later in their shifts.

The online edi­tions’ pay wall would not be of con­cern. The local mid­day news links on my Face­book account are from TV sta­tions, and their pieces are no longer than the syn­opses that our web­sites pro­vide before ask­ing for the sub­scriber log-in.

This means all rou­tine sto­ries, not just strong spot news, are posted dur­ing the day. The rea­son is the “long tail” the­ory: With readers/subscribers in six dig­its, hun­dreds or thou­sands will be inter­ested in even minor pieces.

Face­book and Twit­ter, iPhone and Android, may well be super­seded in a few years by other for­mats, tech­nolo­gies or com­pa­nies. The all-day mul­ti­ple web/print edi­tions can accom­mo­date that evolution.

Sav­ing Money in the Newsroom:

To answer the ques­tion you posed, [name], inef­fi­cien­cies will sur­face shortly after imple­ment­ing this strategy.

This is a con­cept, not so much a con­crete change, but a way of view­ing out­put. We state (to our­selves) that online edi­tions lie on a con­tin­uum with print. The pro­duc­tion of news con­tent con­tin­ues as in future years the demand for print dis­tri­b­u­tion decreases and forms of elec­tronic trans­mis­sion increase.

Staff can be real­lo­cated, retrained as needed, as the shift occurs. The need for pro­pri­etary, semi-customized soft­ware [word pro­cess­ing and desk­top pub­lish­ing] — and pay­ing to update it — will decrease.

Oh, it’s what came to me.

[End of memo]

Deja news

Sure my memo could be bass-ackwards as we used to say in Fort Smith, but now it’s posted in Brick so it won’t be totally a waste.

The sim­i­lar­ity of old all-day met­ros and online access has a rec­tan­gle aspect, this way that way that way this way. Major media movie reviews are printed on Fri­days but posted on Thurs­day — bull­dog! The fun parts of the Sun­day New York Times are avail­able on Sat­ur­day — bull­dog! It’s already started and accepted.

Lots of peo­ple are giv­ing all this seri­ous thought with fresh analy­sis. Here’s one from last week from Sean Blanda, a Philadel­phia media techie: “We Need to Rein­vent the Arti­cle; This Post is Outdated.”

Copy­right 2012 Ben S. Pollock