Better writers needed (and fewer editors)
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Good writing remains one of the stalwart needs in the journalism field.
Read this in the context of slashing the number of editors that stand (often belligerently) between a story and the audience.
The layers of editing newspapers lavish on stories have long been regarded an essential safety net. But [Washington Post managing editor Phil] Bennett says, “It’s time to put the net away.” He’s confident that reduced editing won’t necessarily sacrifice quality if it’s done smartly. As an example, he points to the quality work done by reporters whose copy appears on the Post’s Web site without the extensive editing and re-editing traditionally lavished on the print product.
“The more people who touch a story, the less authority and responsibility each take,” Bennett says.
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.” (Slate, March 14, 2008))
Think about what it means:
- News organizations can no longer afford to hire journalists who are not good, accurate, conscientious writers.
- When you apply for a job, you’ll need to show unedited samples of your work. Such as your blog.
- You cannot leave out the fact-checking. There is no safety net now.
I strongly believe the Post’s new approach is the best one for all news organizations. It depends, however, on the quality of your journalists. They’d better be good. Really good.
Mindy
we’re having similar issues in the UK.
One of our major newspaper groups is planning to slash 20 sub-editors from two of its titles and replace them with designers http://tinyurl.com/5cery5
Mixed reactions to it, some people are saying its about time, others are worried about the quality of the product and the potential legal problems that may occur.
UK commentator Roy Greenslade supported the move, saying it was old and outdated. He got a lot of commenters telling him he was wrong.
My couple of pence/cents worth:
April 11, 2008 at 10:59 amHope Phil Bennett has got some good lawyers, he may need them before too long.
Sure, but should no stories go under an editor’s eyes before being posted online? Should reporters post their stories directly even?
April 11, 2008 at 4:54 pmInteresting that a managing editor is saying there are too many editors. Perhaps the Post could start at the top . . .
April 11, 2008 at 5:51 pm[...] Better writers needed (and fewer editors). If Mindy McAdams is right (and she often is), those reporters who write well and accurately will be top of the hiring heap. [...]
April 11, 2008 at 7:46 pm@Aaron - There’s nothing wrong, in many cases, with a reporter posting a story online with no editing. It is already the standard operating procedure in many larger newsrooms, such as The Miami Herald. For simple daily stories (traffic accidents, crime reports), the goal is to get it online as soon as possible. The copy editor (subeditor) reads it after it’s been posted and edits lightly as needed.
There will always be stories that need the hand of a good editor, especially at the early shaping stages. There will always be a need for quality control in journalism.
But making a story wait and wait and wait until it gets through a narrow bottleneck of editing stations is old-fashioned and unnecessary.
As Bennett implied, if your people are not good enough to write unedited, then they’re not good enough.
April 12, 2008 at 8:13 amI’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this as well. This might actually offer a bright future for copy editors, who tend to write clean and sharp copy, when they write. Copy editors tend to make excellent bloggers, by the way. It will be up to the copy editors to decide if they want to transition into shoe-leather reporting. If they don’t, they might be interested in working with databases or aggregating links. “Thinking and linking” is the future of editing, not pica poles and head specs.
On the subject of reporters posting directly to a blog: It’s important for editors to recognize the new powers that online publishing offers to do more good editing. Now you can go back to a story to keep making it better. I get a little concerned that editors think only of what happens “before” publishing, when “before” and “after” publishing no longer applies.
If three, four or six (not to mention 12!) editors have to touch something, that’s a lot of eight-hour shifts, commutes into work, bodies that have to be in the building, just to get one thing online. Or, a reporter can see a question in the blog and just … answer it. Or a reporter might be live-blogging or twittering an event. See the Meranda Writes blog at http://merandawrites.com and the description of covering a campaign event with “18 online updates and one story for Tuesday’s deadwood edition” for the future of reporting.
There are so many new dimensions to reporting and editing now that aren’t imagined in the traditional, assembly-line process of putting ink on plates and plates to paper. Somebody could write a thesis on how long-ago technologies created the way we still do things.
April 13, 2008 at 9:42 am[...] Algunos puntos clave que destacan en Teaching Online Journalism: [...]
April 15, 2008 at 5:06 am[...] sus blogs sin necesidad de que un editor corrija los originales. La reflexión está recogida por Teaching Online Journalism y citada por la periodista Rosa Jimenez Caro en su bitácora, donde apunta que “las empresas [...]
April 15, 2008 at 6:31 pmImplementing this approach with current hiring standards would be a disaster of epic proportions.
I am painfully aware there are many, many alleged writers who cannot write and many alleged copy editors who either cannot or will not edit. Combining these two underperforming camps under the umbrella of “This is what we want” would be foolhardy.
Likely newspapers will use their usual strategy of waiting for that “one big mistake” to occur before they finally take any action with the person who can’t write a complete sentence or a headline. This will be catastrophic for any organization’s credibility.
Of course, what can we expect from an industry that still waits for that “eye-catching page” to attract readers by the hundreds of thousands?
“As Bennett implied, if your people are not good enough to write unedited, then they’re not good enough.” They’re not good enough; newspapers have refused to address the problem.
April 16, 2008 at 1:55 pmThe problem is that the cleanest writer is never going to be writing in their most pristine state on deadline.
I won’t argue that all stories need to be edited before they go on the Web — merely because that’s a battle already largely lost, not because it’s not the right thing to do. But I will argue that as soon as a story goes up, it should get a good scrubbing. In that way the imperatives of timeliness and cleanliness are satisfied, if a bit uneasily.
But what we’re mostly talking about are breaking-news stories early in the day with garbled proper nouns, sentence fragments, typos and the like. Are we saying readers are OK with seeing sloppy, amateurish writing … and are we saying readers think such writing is credible?
An example from my paper’s Web site just this morning:
“The city may cut loose some big money projects to slow the city’s sliding finances.
The cuts won’t be easy, and could make many iland residents — from senior citizens to soccer players — very unhappy.
The administration reccommended this week that the city cancel planned work on the senior center’s expansion, a new court and police facility, new soccer fields, bicycle lane construction and most of the other items on the 2008 capital facilities plan.”
April 18, 2008 at 7:43 pmJim: If that’s your cleanest writer, then your paper is not hiring well.
That’s the biggest problem here: Newspapers have not hired good writers. My biggest shock when I started editing long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away was how bad the copy was.
There’s no good excuse for misspelled words and glaring errors on a consistent basis. But writers know they can get away with it, so the problems continue.
April 19, 2008 at 1:02 am“Jim: If that’s your cleanest writer, then your paper is not hiring well.”
How certain are you — is anyone — that there are enough reporters with straight-to-publication writing skills to staff all the newsrooms, even with all the cutbacks?
Jim’s paper is small and out of the way; it doesn’t have the resources to compete with the 200K-plus papers for the error-free writers. Thus it’ll always need editors.
April 20, 2008 at 8:49 pmThe shifting sands may affect editing decisions, but who will be the first to test its effect on libel laws? I once heard that the bulk of lawsuits stems from routine stories and even the letters page. Will there be an acceptable window of time that the accused can be wrongfully convicted in pixels?
It’s already worrisome that much of the metro Philadelphia market is convicting accused killers of murder in print and on-air. If there’s no vigilance against going to press with it, there’s nothing but paydays ahead for lawyers.
April 21, 2008 at 10:57 amI would offer up the Matt Drudge - Sidney Blumenthal - AOL case from 1998 as a possible precedent for how libel cases will be handled. It seemed that an argument could have been made in that case for “reckless disregard,” but if it was, it went nowhere. Charges against Drudge were ultimately dropped. Salon wrote about the case in 2001.
April 21, 2008 at 12:02 pm“How certain are you — is anyone — that there are enough reporters with straight-to-publication writing skills to staff all the newsrooms, even with all the cutbacks?”
That’s sort of my point. I’m not sure there are. But newsrooms aren’t doing a good job of finding them, and even when they do, the writers learn very quickly they can get away with a lot. That combination explains why we seem the same pattern of mistakes again and again and again.
Also, writers need to be self-editing. Many of them don’t do this. It’s a flaw that’s going to become more apparent, unless newspapers can improve their hiring processes, and I don’t think they have the skilled management or the selection procedures in place to change their ways.
None of this changes my original conclusion: Jim’s paper doesn’t seem to be hiring well. That sample is nowhere near the quality that should be expected from a professional writer.
April 27, 2008 at 9:12 pm