Downes’ Syndrome: The Times on “The Death of Copyediting”

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… after visiting the Newseum, I know what I have suspected for a few years: if newspaper copy editors vanish from the earth, no one is going to notice.”

In a Changing World of News, an Elegy for Copy Editors: Lawrence Downes, the voice of “suburban issues” on the New York Times editorial board, laments that the sort of care once shown by the language professionals at the copy desk means nothing in a digital world.

I mention it because of a recent experience trying to explain to a Brazilian client why they ought to set up a copy desk that highly technical English-language translations would be reviewed by before being forwarded on to English-language news wires.

Since a key to successful communication is communicating to the reader in the manner to which he or she is accustomed, and since readers of English-language news wires are very, very accustomed to reading copy prepared in accordance either with Financial Times or Associated Press publication style, I suggested to the client that they adopt the Associated Press Stylebook.

The proposal generated a certain amount of incomprehension. I prepared PowerPoint slides and everything, but seemed to get nowhere with it.

In the U.S., journalists and publicists alike use AP style, apparently it is not usual in Brazil for publicists to keep, say, a copy of the Estado de S. Paulo editorial manual on their desks.

And it often shows, I regret to say, both among the hacks (journalists) and the flacks (public relations professionals).

The capacity for the Brazilian press to misspell proper names, even in the Age of Google, never ceases to amaze, for example.

But what is a copy editor? It’s how I have earned my living for a decade or so now, and the Times provides a somewhat romantic job description:

As for what they do, here’s the short version: After news happens in the chaos and clutter of the real world, it travels through a reporter’s mind, a photographer’s eye, a notebook and camera lens, into computer files, then through multiple layers of editing. Copy editors handle the final transition to an ink-on-paper object. On the news-factory floor, they do the refining and packaging. They trim words, fix grammar, punctuation and style, write headlines and captions.

Yes, I have done all that.

But they also do a lot more. Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance; they are minimalist chefs, straining fat. Their goal is to make sure that the day’s work of a newspaper staff becomes an object of lasting beauty and excellence once it hits the presses.

Unfortunately, there is no time for lasting beauty and excellence any longer. The Internet has changed all that. As though we no longer communicated using language at all, but rather some form of packet-switched mental telepathy.

The job hasn’t disappeared yet, but it is swiftly evolving, away from an emphasis on style and consistency, from making a physical object perfect the first time. The path to excellence is now through speed, agility and creativity in using multiple expressive outlets for information in all its shapes and sounds.

As newspapers lose money and readers, they have been shedding great swaths of expensive expertise. They have been forced to shrink or eliminate the multiply redundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism from what you find on TV, radio and much of the Web. Copy editors are being bought out or forced out; they are dying and not being replaced.

Webby doesn’t necessarily mean sloppy, of course, and online news operations will shine with all the brilliance that the journalists who create them can bring.

This is, of course, pure horseshit.

Posting stuff to the Web without copyediting and proofreading first it has the exact same effect as committing it to print without copyediting and proofreading it: It increases your risk of making an ass of yourself with factual errors and errors of language that garble your message.

And when readers start looking for someone to blame, the Times editorialist will realize how wrong he is:

… after visiting the Newseum, I know what I have suspected for a few years: if newspaper copy editors vanish from the earth, no one is going to notice.”

When the copy desk is gone, editorial “content managers” — whose main purpose in life is delegating responsibility for FUBARs to others — will certain miss it, because they will have no one left to blame those FUBARs on.

They might even have to buy themselves a pack of blue pencils a copy of the AP — or a handy online subscription, which I invest in every year — and start making themselves less useless again.