CLOSING GENERAL SESSION

An uncertain future
Amid turmoil in the newspaper industry and the stampede to the
Web, copy editors ask themselves, "Where do we go from here?"



By Jackie Kunzmann

“These are times that try copy editors’ souls.”

With those words, Hank Glamann summed up what’s been happening in the newspaper industry: Newspapers have been sold; previously large companies have ceased to exist; staffs have been reduced. And, through it all, copy editors have been asked to change the way they do their jobs.

An unease is brewing in the ranks. We are concerned about how we maintain our standards as the newspaper industry changes around us.



Hank Glamann leads a "Copy Editors' Town Meeting" on the future of the craft.
“We are very much where we were when we met for the first time 10 years ago in Chapel Hill,” Glamann said, referring to the initial meeting of ACES at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We are coming together as a community and we have some things that we want to get off our chests. We don’t have the option of saying we are not going to do this. A lot of people are experiencing a tremendous amount of stress. We need to talk about how to deal with this.”

And talk about it we did.

In a session Glamann dubbed a “Copy Editors’ Town Meeting,” copy editors attending the 11th ACES conference explored how the online explosion is changing their jobs, and what they can do about it.

“A hopeful way to look at this is that online is the Copy Editors’ Full
Employment Act,” said Deirdre Edgar of the Los Angeles Times and ACES vice president for conferences. “We adapted to pagination; we adapted to new systems. We can adapt to online, too.”

Holly Kerfoot of the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina agreed, saying she found hope in the process of moving to a more online world after spending three days at the annual ACES conference.

And, it’s a world that many in the audience urged copy editors to embrace. Tim Lynch of the Los Angeles Times asked copy editors to think practically and strategically about how they will do their jobs in the online world.

“We can have a voice in saying how we do our jobs and have a say in how we adapt to the Internet,” said Lynch, who received ACES’ Robinson Prize for editing excellence the night before.

Jim Kavanagh of cnn.com, and a former employee at the Akron Beacon Journal, asked copy editors to think of their futures as they explore online.

“I took a pay cut, but not a step back or a step down,” Kavanagh said of his move from print to online. “I took a pay cut for some more years. We have to be willing to take a risk, to game on our futures.”

And, while he’s working in an online platform, Kavanagh stressed that he is still a journalist and upholds the same journalistic standards as he did while working at a newspaper.

And, that, many in the room said, will help newspaper Web sites gain credibility. Instead of lowering the standards for online copy, they were asked to maintain the ones employed in newsrooms.

They were also asked to remember the newspaper reader. As newspapers push more and more into the online world, Raleigh Mann, a former Miami Herald employee and former UNC-Chapel Hill journalism professor, urged the copy editors to remember that customers of their newspapers should drive what is changed.

“If we stand up for the reader, we should be asking ourselves how this change will affect the reader,” he said, adding that he is optimistic that the printed newspaper will survive as long as there are readers.

Glamann and others also noted that many online jobs are, essentially, copy editing jobs.

“As long as there’s a public that needs to be informed, there will always be a need for editors,” said Margaret Caracappa of Axiom Professional Health Learning in Yardley, Pa.

Jackie Kunzmann is a copy editor/page designer at the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

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