Articles on Copyediting

I discovered during a recent googling session that, around the time I decided to pursue copyediting, several articles were published in major news outlets about the subject. Call it the collective unconscious, call it what you will, but for some reason, copyediting, which I'd never heard of before last summer, was a subject of public interest for a brief time. All the articles address the state of the trade in some way, and they don't really have much good news for copyeditors working in traditional settings in the U.S.

The first article was published July 8 in BusinessWeek. Nandini Lakshman's "Copyediting? Ship the Work Out to India" describes an outsource company in India that now has eight major U.S. publishing companies as clients. Their editing and journalism can involve long distance phone calls to verify information or query managing editors at client publications, but not to speak with the actual authors. The most disturbing part of this article, to me at least, is about the company's projected growth. "Mindworks plans to increase its staff from 100 to 1,500 people by 2013.
Joseph has just hired a new head in the U.S. for new business development and plans to build a five-member U.S. operations team to help market Mindworks' services."

In a BusinessWeek commentary on Aug. 4, guest writer Hanan Sher addresses the previous article, describing some of the problems with outsourcing copyediting and highlighting the importance of local knowledge in editing regional news publications. He asserts it would not be possible for non-native editors to fulfill some higher-level copyediting duties, and asks the question, "...how would a copyeditor in Punjab or Pune catch credibility-destroying errors in the description of a crime scene in, say, Santa Ana, Calif.?" Outsource editors may be fine at catching spelling and mechanical errors, but, Sher says, "[Print publications] would be throwing out credibility, reliability, and any semblance of quality—the same journalistic standards that should set them apart from, and far above, Internet blogs and news-aggregating Web sites."

An article describing the changing role of copyeditors appeared Aug. 31 in the Washington Post, not long after the paper cut its copyediting staff by nearly 40% with an early retirement buyout. Deborah Howell addresses the demand that copyeditors be more flexible and do more with less resources. To some extent, the staff cuts are understandable; in the article, senior editors cited an inefficient process where 12 editors might make changes to one piece of copy. However, there is also a good quote from Post sports columnist Mike Wise:

The utter lack of people on the desk who yearn to fix our messes and make decent copy readable is, industrywide, appalling. The advent of writers' stories going directly to the Web site is even more frightening, even in blog form. Beyond the misspellings, you need that one or two good reads -- and that one good-taste editor -- to catch you from falling on your face. About the only thing we have to stake our reputations on in this industry is integrity, and when not enough people have your back on the desk to ensure that you get everything imaginable right and that your tone doesn't undermine your credibility, it really rips at that integrity.

Lastly, in the New York Times Books Review on Sept. 26, Dorothy Gallagher paid tribute to her deceased copyeditor and mentor, Helene Pleasants. At the end, she laments that "Nobody has Helene’s standards; nobody reads like Helene anymore."

What can a young copyeditor learn from all this? For starters, that my chosen profession is facing a dark age. Also, that many writers still believe in credibility and integrity in a time that seems to emphasize the mass production of text more for web traffic and profit generation than for informing and cultivating the public. To survive as a copyeditor in this climate demands more than just an expert eye for sentence style, a blue pencil or red pen, and a stubborn, perfectionist personality.