Why not get political news from a political news outlet, movie reviews from a place that specializes in movies, and local news from an organization that’s really passionate about covering its community rather than viewing it as a JV form of journalism to be endured before moving on to something bigger?

Gahran identifies a number of attitudes that “directly cut off options [for change] from consideration” and can lead to a “toxic” newsroom culture. She also articulates what, to my mind, is turning out to be the central problem with objectivity-era mainstream journalism:

Journalists (more so than most other professions) are supposed to be fundamentally curious and profoundly interested in what’s happening around them.

An apparent lack of curiosity shows up in today’s newspapers in the form of ignorant political journalism, stories written straight from press releases and PR pitches, stories that treat technology and consumer electronics as alien subjects. It shows up inside newsrooms in the form of old-timers who still aren’t comfortable with computers, new-timers who’ve heard of RSS but haven’t tried it out, higher-ups who rarely read journalism/new media blogs.

Institutional strictures are probably the main culprit here. Why bother being well-versed in policy if objectivity conventions forbid you from betraying your expertise in print? Why bother learning how to use new technology if the paper is (until recently) making boatloads of cash doing things the way they’ve always been done? Why explore things like RSS if nobody in the newsroom has articulated why you should do so?

Still, just as newspapers as institutions will have to change, individual journalists will have to ask themselves if they’re curious and interested enough to pro-actively face the coming shakeout. Because in three to five years, it’s likely that the only people to still have journalism jobs will be those who view journalism as more than just that job they’ve always had.

It’s hard to know if KSL’s model is replicable at this point. “I believe most of our success come from getting into the game early,” the site’s director of online content tells Lost Remote. But it would be worth a shot for at least a few other newspapers or TV stations to try.

Via Jack Shafer, I see the Washington Post has accepted that the current editing system is outdated, inefficient, and unaffordable.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.

After the season’s first episode aired, Simon responded to Slate’s TV Club discussion of the show by saying: “The Wire’s depiction of the multitude of problems facing newspapers and high-end journalism will either stand or fall on what happens on screen, not on the back-hallway debate over the past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities of those who create it.” Well, he’s had his on-screen say. And all it did was nearly ruin one of the best shows on TV and prove that David Simon has either no clue or simply nothing interesting to say about the very real, very serious problems facing newspapers in 2008.

Earlier in the season, I wrote of Season 5′s Baltimore Sun storyline: “So far his ‘multitude of problems’ are a) Too many Stephen Glasses, b) Pompous idiot editors too dim to see the clearly telegraphed Stephen Glasses and disinterested in getting at the root of social problems, and at a distant third c) Corporate cost-cutting. That is all.” Six episodes later, that’s still The Wire’s diagnosis. And one moment from the finale crystallizes both the storyline’s unreality and Simon’s apparent cluelessness.

In the closing montage, we see plagiarist Scott Templeton on stage at Columbia University receiving a Pulitzer Prize along with his two evil editors. This plot development is absurd because, as Ann Friedman writes at the American Prospect,

it seemed completely unrealistic that, presented with the evidence, the higher-ups at the paper would turn their heads and ignore Templeton’s plagiarism. Their defense of Templeton made sense up until this last episode — until Gus presumably laid out all the evidence. But even with a Pulitzer on the line, I find it pretty unbelievable that they would just let it all stand.

And because, as David Plotz writes at Slate:

No editor would willfully ignore evidence of a reporter manufacturing stories the way The Wire‘s Sun editors do. It would never be worth it. The New York Times and Washington Post would trade any number of Pulitzers to wipe the stains of Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke from their histories.

And because, as Andrew Johnston writes at The House Next Door, the show’s Pulitzer moment means that

every single person we’ve met who’s on Gus’ side and who has doubts about Templeton—including the Metro, Regional Affairs and State editors, who are all at least Gus’ equal on the masthead and some of whom may be above him on the food chain—every single one of them is a wuss who’s so scared of losing his or her job that they’re willing to let Gus take the fall.

For a show that’s supposedly so realistic, this is plain bad storytelling. But as an indictment of modern newspapers, it’s even worse — because it shows just how little Simon grasps the implications of the Internet.

In the real world of 2008, Templeton simply could not have gotten away with his lies — let alone won a Pulitzer. Plotz writes at Slate, “As we’ve seen this week with the pair of faked memoirs, fabulists get caught.” If the Sun plot were taking place in a real-life newsroom today and evil editors ignored a city editor’s warnings about a possible plagiarist in their ranks, he wouldn’t just take his lumps and demotion to the copy desk in silence. He would e-mail Romenesko, or Jack Shafer (who has just written two columns flagging instances of a reporter’s plagiarism), or Howard Kurtz, or the Pulitzer committee (who would surely take any warnings seriously after the Janet Cooke fiasco). To take a recent real-life example, a week and a half ago blogger Nancy Nall Derringer discovered a White House official had plagiarized a Dartmouth Review essay in a column for an Indiana paper. The official resigned within 12 hours — after the post got picked up on other blogs and other sleuths discovered more plagiarism.

But just as Simon doesn’t seem to grasp that the Internet is the root of newspapers’ non-fictional problems, he doesn’t grasp that the Internet also would have prevented his plagiarist from getting away with it for so long. This is newspapers’ challenge in a nutshell: the Internet has broken their monopoly on distribution, so anyone can be a journalist now and bring down a White House plagiarist, and readers don’t need the physical paper to get the news. This may be bad for newspapers, but it’s great for journalism. More people than ever are reading smart, important journalism because of the Internet, and more shoddy journalism and plagiarism is flagged — even as the Web makes it harder for newspapers to survive in the form they’ve taken for decades.

None of this has anything to do with the newspaper industry depicted in The Wire.

Now, Simon of course argues that the newsroom story does have a deeper point. In a long interview with the Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall, Simon says:

The main theme is not the fabulist and what he is perpetrating. That’s the overt plot. The main theme is that, with the exception of the bookends — at the beginning, the excellent effort at adversarial journalism that begins the piece in episode one and the genuine piece of narrative journalism that concludes it, with Bubbles — it’s a newspaper that is so eviscerated, so worn, so devoid of veterans, so consumed by the wrong things, and so denied the ability to replenish itself that it singularly misses every single story in the season.

If that’s the case — if the gutting of a paper is truly the focus — why does the Templeton story take up 90 percent of the Sun plot while the big missed stories — the deaths of Prop Joe and Omar — are 10-second mentions that only close watchers or recap-readers would catch? Simon also cites Clay Davis’ prosecution as an overlooked story, which fair enough; that’s explicitly presented as a case where staffing cuts led them to miss the story. But Davis has presumably been in office for years — plenty of time for a previously non-gutted newsroom to have done some investigative reporting on the state senator. If the reporters in the fictional equivalent of Simon’s day had done the kind of reporting he implies was done back in the real-life day, even an eventually short-staffed newsroom would have found a way to keep an eye on the biggest political crook in the state (wait, I forgot — the fictional Sun only has five reporters).

In the Star-Ledger interview, Simon goes on to dig himself a deeper hole:

What I’m loving, it makes me warm all over, is that a lot of the obsession of journalists in the evaluating … (isn’t that theme) but whether Whiting is as big an a–hole as Valchek, “Is Gus more of a hero than Colvin?,” “Do they have to put suspenders on that guy?,” “I can’t believe any editor would say that,” “Why would Alma drive all the way over there?” I’m loving it. It’s this onanistic, self-obsessed world of journalism — which is the problem.

Right, that’s definitely journalism’s biggest problem these days: onanistic, self-obsessed navel-gazers like David Simon. To the extent that people have noted some of these minor things, it’s because they are the details that betray Simon’s failure. The fictional editors do speak in journalistic cliches. Alma would have just checked the Sun’s Web site — or logged into the Sun’s computer system at home — instead of driving to the plant to see how her story got played. Again, for a show obsessed with realism, these are tellingly unrealistic details. Simon is ignoring the many extensive, smart critiques of his journalism plotline, just as he’s ignoring the many relevant critiques of real journalism.

Simon gives one brief nod to the Internet in the interview:

This was a story about a newspaper that now — on some fundamental basis — fails to cover its city substantively, and guess what — between out-of-town ownership, carpetbagging editors, the emphasis on impact journalism or Prize-culture journalism and, of course, the economic preamble that is the arrival of the internet and the resulting loss of revenue and staff, there are a f–k of a lot of newspapers that are failing to cover their cities substantively.

Never mind that the Internet, to my recollection, is mentioned exactly zero times on the show. It’s also worth repeating that his model for the show’s “carpetbagging editors” are the universally (except by David Simon) respected John Carroll and Bill Marimow.

One last point: It’s fashionable these days to bash journalism awards, though Simon certainly goes further than most in blaming prize-grubbing for newspapers’ problems. But have a look at some recent Pulitzer winners. In 2007, the Wall Street Journal won for “its creative and comprehensive probe into backdated stock options for business executives that triggered investigations, the ouster of top officials and widespread change in corporate America.” The Birmingham News of Alabama won for exposing “cronyism and corruption in the state’s two-year college system, resulting in the dismissal of the chancellor and other corrective action.” The Boston Globe won for “revelations that President Bush often used ‘signing statements’ to assert his controversial right to bypass provisions of new laws.” In 2006, the Washington Post won for its investigations “of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that exposed congressional corruption and produced reform efforts” and for its “persistent, painstaking reports on secret ‘black site’ prisons and other controversial features of the government’s counterterrorism campaign.” The New York Times won for its “carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune and Sun Herald of Mississippi won for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina. This year, the Washington Post is sure to win for its exposes of Walter Reed Medical Center’s shameful treatment of wounded veterans.

Do these sound like empty “prize-culture” stories to you? They don’t to me. They damn sure are “impact journalism,” though I’m not sure why that’s a pejorative in David Simon’s eyes. Would he be happier if the Post hadn’t written the Abramoff and black sites stories for fear of prize grubbing? If the Times-Picayune hadn’t risked its journalists’ sanity by serving as a lifeline to readers and simply continuing to function after Katrina? If veterans were still routinely housed in mildew-filled rooms because Anne Hull and Dana Priest didn’t write their stories? Yes, plenty of deserving stories don’t win awards. Yes, some less-than-earth-shattering feature stories have probably won Pulitzers. Yes, some resources are probably wasted on occasional journalistic equivalents of movie Oscar moments. But for Simon to imply that Templeton’s plagiarized homeless fluff could actually fly amid these winning entries today is an insult to the many great journalists who aren’t backing down in the face of the industry’s problems.

I’m the last person to peddle false journalism nostalgia. These great Pulitzer winners aren’t going to save newspapers. But I, like many others, am actually trying to do something about it. So to the long list of the industry’s real problems, I would add: supposed champions of journalism who use once-in-a-lifetime cultural megaphones to bitch about 15-year-old personal grudges.

Stoltz argues that “There really isn’t a use case to justify continuing to publish daily stock tables.” There are plenty of other newspaper elements that are beyond justification, or at least deserve a rethinking — box scores and general sports agate, TV and movie listings, op-ed pages. Stoltz’s description of newspapers’ decision-making related to stock tables perfectly captures why other unjustifieds continue to take up space:

I have heard reasons for continuing to publish stock listings. They usually boil down to (1) the fear the paper would lose subscribers; (2) results of a focus group that found people liked the stock tables; (3) our publisher/editor emeritus/board of directors/influential stockholders insist we keep them.

No. 1: You’re hemmoraging readers anyway. The thought that a business decision with profound impact on the future bottom line should be driven by a couple of hundred indignant (let’s be plain) older readers who over-represent themselves with phone calls and (written!) letters to the publisher and top editors is. . . just plain bad business. Sure, you’ll get 200 calls. Accept them politely and forget them immediately. …

No. 2: Focus groups do not have to deal with zero-sum budgets. Focus groups like lots of stuff you can’t afford to keep. In fact, unless you give them a roster of features and tell them they have to lose half of them, you’re not gathering meaningful data. Secondly, doing focus groups with current readers isn’t a good idea anyway. Find potential future users of your news products online and in print. That’s who you have to re-build your business around.

No. 3: They are sentimental, retrograde, self-satisfied, isolated from reality or not paying attention. Do your best to make the case that the choice is another 10 percent staff cut or losing the stock tables. If they don’t buy that argument, do your best to subvert, ignore and marginalize them without getting fired.

This is what traditionally passes for strategic thinking at newspapers. So it’s no wonder that at a time when actually making imaginative, forward-thinking, potentially risky decisions is necessary for newspapers’ future, they are singularly unable to make or even consider those decisions.

Consider, for example, the recurring hand-wringing over comic strips. Something as basic as jettisoning outdated and unfunny strips becomes a perpetual exercise in self-flagellation based on a handful of readers who promise to revolt if the paper kills Family Circus. And if newspapers can’t intelligently and pro-actively decide that Marmaduke and stock tables have had their day, they probably can’t make intelligent higher-level decisions, either.

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.”

Scott Karp has written a post defining his vision for a new kind of Web journalism: one in which linking to the vast sea of information beyond a newspaper’s walls becomes a key part of bringing news to readers. He writes:

“Do what you do best, and link to the rest” is Jeff Jarvis’ motto for newsrooms — the imperative is to reorient newsrooms from a resource-rich, monopoly distribution approach to reporting, where a newsroom could reasonably aim to do it all themselves, to a resource-constrained, networked media reality, where newsrooms must focus on original reporting that matters most — SUPPLEMENTED by links to other original reporting done by other newsrooms — and by individuals.

The idea is that journalists, editors, and newsrooms need to LEVERAGE the web, leverage the network to help them do more — in so many cases now, with less.

But I would take Jeff’s web-savvy advice a step further: “Make linking to the rest an essential part of what you do best.”

It’s a compelling vision, and the examples of forward-thinking papers already using Scott’s Publish2 network show it can be done. [After-the-fact disclosure: I now work for Scott at Publish2.] But as I’ve discussed with Scott, while this may be a great idea for newspaper Web sites, there are no hyperlinks in print. How can we marry this vision of newspaper-as-linker to the print product?

Return for a moment to the question of why newspapers are boring. I’ve suggested two answers: that the kinds of stories papers typically run aren’t interesting or relevant to average readers, and that non-local stories send the strongest signal that papers are boring. I described some institutional reasons papers run those kinds of stories, but I left out a main one: Those stories are a majority of what the wires provide.

Most newspapers rely for their non-local news and opinion on some combination of the AP and the Washington Post/LA Times, New York Times, and McClatchy-Tribune wires. These wire services are important and necessary for putting out a paper. But they deprive readers of so much more. “Horrible as it may sound, on many days the newsprint front page tastes of already chewed gum,” Jack Shafer writes in Slate. He’s right — because newspapers’ narrow pool of sources has been outpaced by the Internet.

All the great content that makes the Web so addictive/magical — all the stuff that Scott Karp wants papers to link to from their Web sites — is missing from print newspapers. Terrific magazine articles. Stories in smaller papers that don’t make it over the wires. Web sites. The blogosphere. Newspaper readers typically see little of this enormous conversation going on around them. No wonder papers read like a hermetically sealed relic of the pre-Internet age. They’ve basically walled themselves off from the greatest information explosion in decades.

Part of this is simply a matter of logistics and legality: The wires don’t include any of this stuff, so how can newspapers run it? I took Bill Walsh to task for saying “we go to press with the staff we have, not the staff we wish we had,” but it would certainly be accurate to say “we go to press with the wires we have.” And if editors do find something online, chances are they don’t have the rights to use it in full.

But I think papers’ self-segregation also stems from a combination of technological ignorance and an outdated view of the Web. How many editors routinely read blogs and other non-mainstream-media news and commentary? How many know what RSS is, let alone have their own reader set up? How many know how to make a tinyurl link? If you don’t know what’s out there, you can’t bring it to your readers. I’m guessing that the old view of “You can’t trust what you find on the Internet” is still recited too often as an incantation to avoid grappling with the implications of the Web.

The truth is, most prominent blogs are connected to established media outlets or are written by journalists (Andrew Sullivan and James Fallows blog at the Atlantic; Talking Points Memo just won a George Polk award); or they’re written by academics and experts (Balkinization on law); or they’re just fun pop culture blogs or aggregators where the trust is transparent: in the quality of their riffs and links (Best Week Ever, Kottke.org). Newspaper editors and reporters need to dive in to the not-so-wild Web, if they haven’t already, so we can start figuring out how to bring all of these great voices into newspapers.

For the long term, that means coming up with a new rights system or a new version of the wires so print papers can use material from the Web. But in the meantime, there are ways to bring the Web into the paper. In today’s tbt*, for example, I took a quote from this amazing video report on Dean Kamen’s new bionic arm and turned it into a little item on our News Talk pages. I also included a tinyurl link to a story from a local New Hampshire paper about the man who is testing out the new arm. Tinyurls in print are nowhere near as efficient as a Web link. Most readers probably won’t follow them. But some will — and they’ll find something that was more interesting than anything else in the paper today.

Newspapers are ultimately boring because you always know what you’re going to see — politics, war, city council meetings, basketball scores — and you can expect they’ll be heavy on simplistic conventional wisdom. Great blogs are interesting because you never know what they’ll link to next, or what insightful commentary they’ll come up with. If newspapers had more of that surprise, more of those interesting voices, then readers wouldn’t know what they’re going to see when they pick up the paper in the morning. And that’s the surest way of getting them to keep picking it up.

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!

Taking a different approach to news requires looking at the audience in a different way. A traditional newspaper might view its readers as fairly unsophisticated people who have no exposure to news or pop culture elsewhere; as innocents who will faint at bad language; as sponges who will accept whatever the paper gives them, whether or not it’s well-written, well-edited, or interesting. This view ignores major changes in the culture at large.

As Steven Johnson notes in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You, today’s pop culture is far more complex than that of even 15 years ago. Shows like Lost, The Sopranos, and The Simpsons have dozens of characters and plotlines, layers of jokes, and a lack of clichéd handholding that made older shows so literal. Video games require players to juggle dozens of objectives while figuring out how a game’s world and rules work. “All around us the world of mass entertainment grows more demanding and sophisticated, and our brains happily gravitate to that newfound complexity,” Johnson writes.

It’s not just shows and games. Consider “the cultural and technological mastery of a ten-year-old today: following dozens of professional sports teams; shifting effortlessly from phone to IM to e-mail in communicating with friends; probing and telescoping through immense virtual worlds; adopting and troubleshooting new media technologies without flinching,” Johnson writes. “… Their brains are being challenged at every turn by new forms of media and technology that cultivate sophisticated problem-solving skills.” Advertising and public relations, too, are far more sophisticated. The media menu has been greatly expanded for anyone with access to the Internet. Meanwhile, people are exposed to cursing, sex, and violence at ever younger ages.

But as the rest of the culture has become vastly more sophisticated, newspapers generally remain stuck in a bygone era — often willfully so. Instead of ignoring the changes in the audience and culture, an aspirationally non-boring newspaper would embrace them in service of a more interesting, lively news report.

That means assuming readers have a general awareness of the news and culture: sports fans watch SportsCenter and check box scores online, pop culture fans watch Access Hollywood, everyone checks Yahoo or CNN.com at work. This lets you dispense with One-Sentence News or repetitive background and give readers something they haven’t seen already.

It means expecting readers will understand sarcasm and appreciate it if you point out when someone in the news is being silly or lying. Even if newspapers don’t adopt the overt subjectivity some tabloid headlines have, the mindset behind those headlines — a skepticism of empty statecraft and PR, an understanding of the limits of supposed objectivity — can be applied in other ways. For example, a politician’s speech shouldn’t be newsworthy simply for the fact that it was given; a State of the Union address or presidential debate is news only insofar as the politicians say something interesting or surprising. If they do, try running the quote or a comment about the quote rather than a 20-inch non-story.

Looking at readers in a new way also means giving up the “family newspaper” charade. If kids supposedly don’t read the newspaper anymore, why are papers still so prudish when it comes to language? Gustavo Arellano had a great column in the LA Times last week pointing out the absurdity of the Times’ dancing around profanity in two recent stories: the obituary for former Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, which noted that he resigned in 1976 “after telling an obscene joke that was derogatory to blacks”; and a story about new Times/Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell directing a “two-word obscenity” at an Orlando Sentinel photographer at a staff meeting. Zell had said “fuck you,” and Butz — clearly a prince of a man — had told a “joke” that went, “The only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.”

Leave aside that the Times (and other papers) purposely avoided telling readers the central points of two stories. Also leave aside the general ridiculousness, as Arellano points out, of him not being “able to print Butz’s joke or Zell’s f-bomb in a Times column criticizing The Times for not printing them in the first place.” Why do newspapers pretend that adults have never heard or spoken a curse word before? I wrote a paper on Holden Caulfield‘s frustration at seeing “fuck” written on a school wall in my ninth-grade English class, for goodness’ sake. It’s ultimately condescending to tell people we think they’re too fragile to hear real language.

Newspapers don’t need to be printing curse words every day to remain relevant. But the language prudishness is a symptom of a wrong-headed view of today’s savvy readers that affects the entire industry. Several years ago, there was a period of near-constant hand-wringing over certain Boondocks strips and whether it was okay to print Doonesbury strips that included the words “son of a bitch,” “turd blossom,” and “f—” (or just —-, it’s hard to tell from this hilarious 2004 Boston Globe story) and references to masturbation.

This line from the Globe story should be newspapers’ epitaph if they don’t make it through the current downturn:

“Like The Boston Globe, the News-Journal published the strip but deleted the ‘F’ and ran four dashes instead of three.”

It boggles the mind that at a time when the Internet was long since ascendant, when circulation was dropping, when newspapers should have been thinking about how to fix themselves, any journalist would have spent time worrying about whether it’s okay for a comic strip aimed at adults to reference the vice president of the United States’ saying “Go fuck yourself” on the Senate floor.

As long as newspapers assume readers are like Ralph Wiggum, those readers are going to decamp for media and publications that treat them as 21st century adults.