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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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