THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512090001
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
You didn't have to be a careful reader to spot the misspelling that polluted last Sunday's Commentary headline - ``Give a hoot! Don't polute Commission's message.''
Or the teaser atop a recent MetroNews front that sent readers to the wrong page and the wrong section.
And I'm still hearing about the headline error on a national health story. The story said that ``one of every 33 young black men'' in the U.S. has the AIDS virus; the headline said ``1 in 3.''
These lapses move readers to scorn, rage, frustration - even to offering to give us grammar and math lessons. Some volunteer to come in and write headlines themselves. I don't blame them for getting steamed.
How do these errors happen? How do we end up with missing chunks of type between a front-page story and its continuation? Don't we have proofreaders, for gawsh sake?
We don't, we have copy editors and layout or design editors - not to mention news editors and tab editors and wire editors and metro editors and sports editors, etc.
But for all their anonymity, copy editors are often the folks in the line of fire, the ones who write the headlines and captions and text blocks that are in the public eye. And their job is not easy.
I started out as a copy editor in the '70s, and recall those days with fondness but resignation. From the public, you heard only about the mistakes. And from reporters, only how you messed up their Pulitzer Prize-winning story - never mind how many times we bailed them out.
To refresh and update old memories, I spent an evening this week watching the madness that we call putting out a daily paper. Actually, it's a quiet madness since the work doesn't peak till nightime. By then, many reporters and editors have gone home and those remaining are busy clacking away on computer keyboards.
There are no shouts of ``copy'' because copy kids went out with dinosaurs. Likewise, no ``stop the presses'' - we still stop them, but the presses are out in Virginia Beach, out of yelling reach.
That's not the only change. In those early years, I sat at a round desk along with a half-dozen other copy editors. In the middle, and towering over us, was the omnipotent Slot Man who read over every word we edited and scrutinized each headline as though it were the only one in the paper.
When Slot Man approved the merchandise, it was popped into a pneumatic tube (we actually used paper in those days!) and sent to the composing room, where typesetters - the human variety - punched or scanned it in and made us page proofs. (Proofreaders were an anachronism even back then.) But no page was released without a final OK from an editor.
Today, in The Pilot's Norfolk newsroom, copy editors are clustered together, but not like the Knights of the Round Table. The slot position rotates from day to day and there's no way to read behind every word that's set in print.
Technology and page design have changed the job most dramatically. Back then, we sketched out story placement on paper and plopped in black and white photos to break up the type. Today, each section front is filled with color and art elements, text blocks and computer charts. The display pages are done on Macintosh computers, most of the others on regular computer terminals - and somewhere between the two is where the type frequently gets lost.
Certainly, copy editors' jobs are much more diversified. With the composing room virtually phased out, they not only edit, write headlines, cut in stories and lay out pages, they also do their own printing and formatting, page proofing and typesetting. They move from Macs to text-editing terminals to layout terminals and back again.
And, as copy editors always have, they handle a lot of copy in a very short period of time. On Tuesday night, for example, Erica Smith was the slot person. For the first edition of the paper, she and her 4 1/2 rim editors - with help from the layout crew - handled 44 stories. That included the North Carolina section, Business News, world and national stories and some local copy.
For the Metro edition, Smith handled nine stories in the hour before deadline - and that didn't include more than a page of obituaries that came over on deadline. There were checks and rechecks. Even so, a MetroNews headline had to be corrected the next day.
Human error is a constant; so are tight deadlines. But add to them the demands of technology, downsized staff and complex page designs, and you have a Maalox-level job. On the plus side, as far as workload is concerned, there are fewer editions of the newspaper now.
I don't remember making any mistakes back in the good old days, but chalk that up to selective memory. At least we got to see the pages before 230,000 readers looked them over for errors.
Today, copy editors often don't see their final handiwork until you do, the next morning on their doorstep. Once proofread, many pages are typeset directly to the plant. Hit the wrong button and. . . well, I don't want to even think about it.
A headline error or missing type seems almost minor in comparison.
MEMO: Call the public editor at 446-2475, or send a computer message to
lynn(AT)infi.net
by CNB