Via Jack Shafer, I see the Washington Post has accepted that the current editing system is outdated, inefficient, and unaffordable. From a memo to Post staff by executive editor Downie and managing editor Philip Bennett:

We will remove layers of editing by providing greater flexibility to determine when a story is edited and by whom. We will create truer alignment of editing for the web and for the paper, recognizing that deadlines for many pieces are defined as the earliest moment they can be edited and published online. We will deepen collaboration among editors on assignment desks, copy desks, photo and the news desk to change how a story, graphic or photograph goes into the newspaper.

Overall, these changes are meant to make our editing model less like an assembly line — moving copy towards the presses on a pre-determined schedule – and more like a network, responding to how journalism is actually created, distributed and discovered by our audiences in print and online.

My main recommendation for keeping copy editors was to give them more responsibility as editors. This is the first element of the Post’s plan:

Several editors will move from the National and Foreign copy desks to take on new roles that begin earlier in the day. These assistant editors will have broad responsibilities for moving early copy to the web and for the next day’s paper. They will provide the first read on some stories and the final edit on others. They will compose working headlines. They will collaborate with the News Desk to assign stories to pages earlier than our current practices allow.

I argued that giving copy editors more responsibility would potentially allow for fewer eyes on a story because a handful of thorough edits can be better than a half-dozen cursory edits. This is the Post’s logic as well:

With the involvement of assistant editors, we’ll reduce layers of editing. Currently, stories in the A section are routinely changed by a half-dozen different editors (an audit by Don Podesta for this project found fingerprints of 12 different editors on one single inside piece). Under the new model, many stories will be handled under a “two touch” rule; they will have a first editor and a second editor.

My next recommendation was to free up copy editors for new roles by giving reporters and line editors responsibility for basic tasks traditionally left to copy editors. The Post calls for this as well:

In addition to supervising their reporters, assignment editors will advance the editing process by doing more fact-checking, and (along with assistant editors) composing working headlines for pieces. Working headlines will also be welcome from reporters when they file.

Finally, I disagreed with copy editor curmudgeons who doubt change is possible because “this is the way it’s always been” or because they think reporters will never learn to write or worry about the little things that copy editors have always had to check. My answer to that argument: make reporters change. So it was especially nice to see this in Shafer’s piece:

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.”

If the Post truly follows through, this will amount to a revolution. Every newspaper editor should read Shafer’s story and the Post memo — and consider making the same kinds of changes.

UPDATE: David Sullivan has a much more skeptical take on the Post memo. He argues that this has been tried in the past, and all that happened is dayside people spent their time working on pretty centerpieces and still left all the real editing and too many stories for the night desk. I think he’s right to be wary, but the Post’s plan seems to be different in several ways from similar attempts in the late 80s/early 90s.

According to Sullivan, those attempts came in response to investors getting crabby about poor (or no) earnings growth during a general economic downturn. But the business was still sound; the industry was doing fine; that’s just shareholders doing what they do. The Post’s attempt to transform editing is a response to a crumbling industry whose business model is in peril. It’s less a “hey, where can we shave costs regardless of if it makes sense for day-to-day operations” plan than the start of a holistic attempt to reconfigure newsroom roles in the face of the new reality.

The plan will only work if the Post is serious about rethinking newsroom roles; as I said in my original post, changing copy editors’ roles without giving more responsibility to reporters and line editors for basic stuff won’t solve anything. But the Post’s memo and Phil Bennett’s comment to Shafer about reporters who can’t write indicates to me that they understand that. At least I hope they do.

without an Academy to determine an authoritative English, and without the ability of dictionary makers to “fix” the language, the task of establishing principles of grammar and usage has fallen to a mixed group authorities of varying reliability.

So all those ironclad rules about split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions that teachers harped on, and much of the stuff in the AP stylebook, is basically derived from little more than self-reinforcing cycles of personal preference. Good times.

McIntyre also links to a fun anti-Grammar Day post at Language Log. Both well worth checking out.

I took issue with some responses to Mutter’s post that essentially argued for the status quo because a)”that’s the way it’s always been” and b) reporters and line editors are so lazy and useless that copy editors are needed to pick up their slack. Now comes an even lamer version of the latter argument, in the latest American Copy Editors Society newsletter. ACES president Chris Wienandt writes:

I’ve just been hit with another reason copy editors are indispensable: We know how our computer systems work. …

When a story goes missing in the system, who’s the person who can find it? When a reporter doesn’t know how to generate the character ä, who’s the person who can tell her? When two versions of a story are floating around, who can spot which one is actually going into print?

[large snip]

So when these little glitches … no, snafus … crop up in your newsroom, it’s great that you can fix them. But be sure to take that next step: Let someone in authority know … that there was a problem, and that it was the copy desk that solved it. It’s another demonstration of how valuable we are. (italics mine)

Is Wienandt serious? Newspapers are hemorrhaging cash and he’s trying to justify keeping copy editors because they possess the most basic technological knowledge? I’m sure Wienandt has written plenty of other pieces about why copy editors are important as editors rather than as IT cheat sheets, but come on.

I’m not convinced that copy editors are in fact “organizations’ repository of technical knowledge”; I’ve worked with plenty of copy desk luddites (who were nonetheless excellent editors). But to the extent that this assumption is true, it’s because institutional biases have taught reporters and line editors they don’t need to bother with learning piddling minutiae like how the computer system works. After all, that’s the lowly copy editor’s job! Wienandt’s argument thus boils down to this: Copy editors should be proud that newspapers’ organizational structures have allowed reporters to treat them as their IT bitches. I don’t mean to be crude, but it’s a staggeringly defensive definition of an employee’s “value” — battered copy editor syndrome at its worst.

If copy editors truly value themselves and want to argue for their jobs, this deeply ingrained defensiveness needs to end. Stop letting reporters and editors get away with not learning the basics — whether of grammar, style, or computers. Stop being proud of being the newsroom’s backstop/doormat. (Yes, copy editors are valuable for preventing errors from appearing in print and cleaning up copy. But again, this is a curiously defensive notion of value.) And for god’s sake, stop giving up and saying, in Wienandt’s words:

It would be pretty to think that other people in the newsroom would have the level of diagnostic know-how that we do. But that ain’t gonna happen.

Bill Walsh said the same thing, in response to Alan Mutter’s post, about why reporters and content editors can’t learn basic stuff like spelling and grammar: “to quote Paul Simon, ’cause that’s not the way the world is, baby.”

But as Homer said when Marge told him to stop dreaming about moving under the sea because “It’s not going to happen”: Not with that attitude.

As I wrote before,

Okay, fine. Maybe that’s the way it is. The answer isn’t to throw up your hands and tell your shareholders, “Sorry, we can’t change the way we work because reporters are lazy and that’s the way things are.”…

Instead, start telling reporters that this attitude is no longer tenable or acceptable. … And if you actually do change the desk’s job, in ways suggested above or otherwise, then you have that much more weight behind you when you tell reporters the old way isn’t how it’s going to work anymore.

Maybe this is just a generational or personality difference. But I truly can’t fathom how such a resigned attitude is supposed to justify copy editors’ existence. Worse, it could end up actually diminishing copy editors’ value in a company’s eyes.

The more we defensively argue that copy editors are useful primarily for picking up slack when others don’t do their jobs, the easier it will be for companies to fire copy editors when others finally are forced to pick up the slack because of money and manpower crunches. At that point, if nobody has defined a positive vision for copy editing, if the chief arguments are still “copy editors do what others are too lazy to do,” then copy editors will have made themselves redundant.

Put another way: When working in a deeply wounded industry, the best way to protect your job is not to argue “I can do what previously fat profits have allowed others in my company to avoid doing.” It’s to say, “In a contracted future when everyone has to take on previously distributed basic responsibilities, here are all the new and valuable things I’ll do that nobody else can.”

As Vulture points out, “The entire article is a masterpiece of tortured syntax that deftly removes all humor from the videos.” Here are the best parts, as flagged by Vulture:

“A satiric video in which Mr. Kimmel, the host of the ABC late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live, talks enthusiastically — jokingly, we are led to believe — about his sexual relationship with Ben Affleck, has been a huge hit online. …

“After Ms. Silverman revealed that she was hooking up with Mr. Damon — everywhere, it seemed, and all the time — Mr. Kimmel vowed to take his revenge. … Most of the lyrics of Mr. Kimmel’s and Ms. Silverman’s songs are too graphic to be repeated here. One vulgar word describing the coital relations between, on the one bed, Ms. Silverman and Mr. Damon, and on the other, Mr. Kimmel and Mr. Affleck, was repeatedly bleeped out for the broadcast of each video.”

Never mind the priceless juxtaposition of New York Times second-reference style with the subject (Mr. Kimmel is fucking Mr. Affleck — must show the proper deference!). Could the Times possibly have written a more unironic, monocle-wearing ode to their own dowdiness? It’s not just the language dodge, which is bad enough. They’re still writing about comedy bits with a straight face — the way the Times probably wrote about that just wonderfully droll Church Lady in 1988.

This was a one-off (two-off, really) viral video attempt. Proper responses include laughing and forwarding to a friend; watching a second time; ignoring; and writing a blog post about the inevitable and annoying response videos. Responses that show you don’t get it include: writing a long article simply summarizing the videos — even while blushing and hiding from the central joke — and treating them like big productions that need to be explained and reported on.

Listening to the radio in the car yesterday, I heard an announcer warn of the possibility of “rain activity” later in the day. How, I wondered, does rain activity differ from rain?

McIntyre also gives a nice rundown of the many unnecessary words TV weatherpeople use for snow:

snow event, snowfall, snowstorm, snowflakes, sleet, slush, wintry mix, blizzard, precipitation, icy pellets, powder (for skiing), blanket and the apparently irresistible vulgarism white stuff.

Ah, mid-Atlantic winters. One of the great things about living in New Hampshire (lots of snow) and then Florida (no snow) is not having to watch TV newspeople go nuts over the hint of flurries and report from the supermarket on people rushing to buy bread, toilet paper and milk — just as they (both newspeople and shoppers) have done every single other time ever that there’s been snow in the region.

And yet, you never hear anyone worry that TV news is going broke. No justice, I tells ya.

First, Alan Mutter calls out The Oklahoman for wildly overplaying a story about a U.S. Geological Survey project mapping out where burmese pythons could survive in an ever-warmer U.S. The study found that the pythons “could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast,” according to USA Today. The Oklahoman’s story examined the finding that most of Oklahoma is now a possible python habitat, and concluded in the fourth paragraph that

Even though the pythons might find Oklahoma’s weather suitable, local wildlife experts don’t expect to run into any of the massive constrictors any time soon.

Nonetheless, the piece ran as the front-page lead story with a large, two-deck headline reading: “Big snakes could slither into state.”

The story, of course, says no such thing. Mutter asks, “why did the Oklahoman play this non-story in the sensational fashion it did?” I think the answer — besides simple bad editorial judgment — is that papers fear running interesting stories just for the sake of running an interesting story. There has to be some ostensible “news peg” or other timely reason for running the story.

I actually disagree with Mutter that the python study is a non-story. I think there are three interesting stories wrapped up in this: that pythons and other invasive snakes have already taken root in the Florida wilds (remember this amazing/horrifying photo?); that enough people own these kinds of snakes and set enough free that the species are able to establish footholds (or bellyholds) in the wild; and that the U.S. climate is changing enough that it could one day support pythons in the wild in areas outside of the Everglades

Now, you’d need a bit more information to really flesh this out. How many people have burmese pythons, have they been found in the wild anywhere outside of Florida, which of the areas in the U.S.G.S. maps could sustain pythons now vs. which are theoretical habitats but more likely to produce “snake-sickles” (in the words of one skeptical Oklahoma City snake breeder), etc. But I think it’s definitely an interesting story — especially given that the Oklahoman article notes that “[a]t least four Burmese pythons have been surrendered to the Oklahoma City animal shelter in the past four years.” The story could have run farther down the page with a headline like “Don’t set your python free” and a subhed like “The state’s climate could support the large snakes in the wild, study finds” or “State’s climate could support wild pythons, study finds, but breeders are skeptical.” Something along those lines.

Why didn’t they do that? My guess is, because then the story “isn’t news” as news is currently understood. The story, run with an accurate headline, would have provided no timely reason to put it on the front page; there’s nothing “important” about it. But if a new view of news and newspapers took hold — one in which interesting stories get as much play as so-called important or timely ones — readers could have gotten both an interesting article and an accurate headline.

The other blog post that caught my eye was a quick one at The American Scene. Peter Suderman writes:

Here’s what I really want to know (besides, obviously, the whole deal with that giant-foot statue in Lost): Why is More Americans Are Giving Up Golf currently the top story at the New York Times’ website? Aren’t there more exciting things going on in the world?

I’m not familiar enough with Suderman’s writing style to know how tongue-in-cheek this is; he didn’t ask “aren’t there more important things going on,” at least. Either way, the question assumes there’s something wrong-headed about newspaper readers gravitating toward a story they actually find interesting.

I’m not a golfer, and I don’t watch golf except the ends of big tournaments when the TV’s on at work. But the post-Tiger Woods golf boom interested me, and I pay attention here and there. So I was very surprised to read in the Times story that there actually hasn’t been a post-Tiger golf boom:

The total number of people who play has declined or remained flat each year since 2000, dropping to about 26 million from 30 million, according to the National Golf Foundation and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.

This may not have the world-historical importance of Kosovo’s independence, Musharraf’s party’s losses in Pakistan, or the presidential election. But it’s not as though the New York Times devoted resources to this golf story to the exclusion of everything else (unlike The Wire’s fictional newsroom, they can cover more than one subject at once). I think it’s great that it was the most popular story on the site — that means non-news junkies are still reading stuff in the New York Times.

Of course there can be too much celebrity gossip coverage, or too much awards-show coverage, or too much of any non-geo-political news. But we need to start thinking more in terms of a healthy balance between what we’ve traditionally thought of as news and stories that are interesting simply for the sake of being interesting.

Alan Mutter has a post making the rounds today bluntly titled “Can newspapers afford editors?” Mutter wonders how many editors really need to look at a story before it goes to print.

There are some obvious rejoinders to Mutter’s post. John McIntyre has a good one:

Dear reader, as a copy editor for the past 28 years, I’ve seen what writers, both amateur and professional, file, and you don’t want to. Unless you have a depraved appetite for factual errors, blurred focus, wordiness, slovenly grammar, peculiar prose effects and other excesses, it is in your interest for someone other than the writer to go over that text to clean it up, identify its point, and make sure that it gets to the point before you lose all interest.

John Robinson writes:

Of course, editors do much more than edit copy. They teach. We aren’t the New York Times. Reporters don’t come to us fully baked. (No one does, actually.) Editors help guide coverage. … We have also developed specialists. A good conceptual editor who can inspire reporters may not be a good technical editor who can find grammatical flaws or write pithy headlines.

But if we’re going to seriously rethink newspaper assumptions and traditions, we have to rethink all those assumptions — including the ones Mutter questions.

My own feeling is that we shouldn’t think of editing as a zero-sum game, as a choice between three edits (or six, or whatever) and pristine stories on the one hand, and no edits but awful copy on the other. Fewer eyes may be absolutely appropriate — if those eyes look at stories differently than they do now.

That means empowering and giving more responsibility to reporters and editors alike. It may be that having copy editors who focus on style, grammar and headlines are increasingly a luxury. But the answer isn’t to fire all copy editors and rush stories to print without thinking about any of those elements. The answer is to change the definition of a copy editor, reporter, and line editor.

Here’s one crazy idea that would help start redefining roles: Scrap the AP stylebook. Or rather, drastically simplify the stylebook so there are a handful of basic rules that every journalist can easily remember. This is a topic for another post, but I think the stylebook is a largely outdated artifact that mostly gunks up a newsroom’s works and adds confusion, not clarity, to stories. (For example, the average reader probably doesn’t know that Mo. is the abbreviation for Missouri rather than Montana, or why there are two different ways of depicting numbers in this sentence: “The 3-year-old boy ate three cookies.”) Even McIntyre seems to have conceded that maybe we can ease up a bit on the linguistic taskmaster role.

So first, radically simplify the stylebook — and then give reporters some responsibility for learning the new basic style rules. Also train them to write headlines, so each story draft is accompanied by a headline idea. Bloggers have to write headlines for each post, so why shouldn’t reporters write headlines for their stories? Yes, I know — headline writing is a skill and a craft, not everyone is good at it, etc. But if we’re asking journalists to become increasingly multifaceted technologically — giving reporters video cameras, making copy editors post to the Web — I think we can ask for some basic journalistic multitasking.

Line editors need to become more multi-faceted as well and take some responsibility for the kinds of things copy editors traditionally do. In my first full-time newspaper job (as an assistant news editor at a small New Hampshire paper), I did first reads and final reads, pointed out holes in stories and fixed grammar, helped reporters recraft ledes and crafted my own headlines. I was a conceptual- and technical-minded editor. If more editors took on more of those responsibilities, fewer eyeballs on a story might be fine.

“But I’m already drowning under too much copy,” a line editor might respond. Then the obvious answer is to make more line editors. And once the stylebook is simplified and reporters and line editors have started paying more attention to what’s left of copy editors’ traditional focuses, copy editors would be freed up to be more like line editors. Instead of funneling a flood of stories through a small number of line editors before sending them to a larger copy desk, why not have copy first flow to a larger group of empowered line editors? That would ease bottlenecks of copy flow, put more focused eyeballs on copy earlier in the process, and possibly allow papers to cut down on the number of edits involved — not for the purpose of firing people, but for freeing them up for other things.

As we move toward a Web-centric newspaper world, editors will increasingly be valued as curators who point readers to the most interesting news and miscellany from all over. Eventually the print paper will be just another distribution channel for a news organization’s content. Imagine if copy editors at that point were line editing stories as well as writing headlines, plucking stories from various places to package with local content as well as repackaging or rewriting that local material, and figuring out how to present it in a new, compelling way. They wouldn’t be copy editors anymore — they’d be a hybrid of line editor, copy editor, wire editor, reporter, and designer.

Now imagine a newsroom where instead of rigid boundaries between all of those positions, there was simply one group of empowered supereditors. That’s the paper where I’d want to work.

Realistically, yes, this might allow for a rapacious, soulless media company to fire some people. I don’t want to sound like Templeton on The Wire, dismissing layoffs as simply casting off deadwood. But “change or die” is not just the new motto for some amorphous group of newspaper industry titans. We each have a responsibility to be thinking about that change, offering up ideas, and being willing to challenge assumptions and try new things — just as the powers that be have a responsibility to encourage and experiment with those ideas. Otherwise, we will all get left behind.

UPDATE: Bill Walsh anticipates my argument:

If you’ve worked your way into a content-editing position at a major publication, as a colleague recently asked me rhetorically, why can’t you be expected to be reasonably competent at spelling and grammar? The answer is (a) we should be aiming higher than reasonably competent, and (b), to quote Paul Simon, ’cause that’s not the way the world is, baby. …

Perhaps someday consolidation will reshape the business to the extent that all aspiring journalists know that news organizations can afford to insist on hiring only the cream of the crop — the multiple threats who can report, write, big-picture edit, little-picture edit, craft display type, take photos and video, design pages, and code HTML. … Until then, we go to press with the staff we have, not the staff we wish we had.

I find this type of response to Mutter’s post — “This is the way things are because this is the way they’ve always been” — unpersuasive. The Rumsfeld dig is meant to be cute, but remember that Rummy’s lame quote was based on a false deadline imposed by a Bush administration bent on going to war. So in that sense he was actually right — they didn’t have time to train a new generation of soldiers or move more battalions based on their manufactured timetable. But newspapers could and should have been planning for this moment for at least 10 years now — more than enough time to work toward a staff they might wish to have.

More to the point, I’m not sure why Walsh assumes that only the “cream of the crop” will be successful “multiple threats.” Every journalist from here on out will need to learn multiple new skills to be able to survive in the new media landscape. Again, I don’t see why a little more basic journalistic multitasking can’t be a part of the average journalist’s arsenal.

And what if the “staff we have” comment is true. Why do things have to stay that way? What if journalism schools started training their students to become “multiple threats,” and newspapers changed the way they work (in the ways I suggest in this post or otherwise) to both take advantage of these new journalists and retrain current ones? Maybe there would be issues of “barriers of concentration, time management and perhaps left-brain-vs.-right-brain function,” as Walsh says. Or maybe if editors were trained differently from the beginning and newsrooms empowered all editors instead of segregating them according to narrow different tasks, we’d find that it’s possible after all. I don’t know. But I do know that “that’s the way it is” isn’t going to cut it much longer.

UPDATE II: Nancy Nall has a similar take. After recounting an example of unedited copy from back in the day, she writes:

Not all reporters are this bad. But more are than you might think. In my experience, the number who check spelling, style, grammar, facts or anything else dwindle by the day. Their mantra is: That’s the desk’s job.

Okay, fine. Maybe that’s the way it is. The answer isn’t to throw up your hands and tell your shareholders, “Sorry, we can’t change the way we work because reporters are lazy and that’s the way things are.” (And no, newspapers ideally shouldn’t be worrying about shareholders and quarterly earnings. But until more papers are taken private or go the St. Pete Times/Poynter route, that’s the reality.)

Instead, start telling reporters that this attitude is no longer tenable or acceptable and that they have to change their damn mantra. And if you actually do change the desk’s job, in ways suggested above or otherwise, then you have that much more weight behind you when you tell reporters the old way isn’t how it’s going to work anymore. If you tell any one part of the paper to change on its own, that probably won’t work. But if it’s part of a larger process where everybody’s roles shift and their responsibilities increase, it’s doable.

I also like how Nall casually says, “For my money, you could can one-third to one-half the designers at any given newspaper.” So to recap: reporters are lazy and worthless, half the designers are useless — but the copy desk must stay exactly as it is!