Editing consultant Merrill Perlman (right) works to define what used to be called a copy editor while fellow panelist Teresa Schmedding, checks in with her newsroom at the Daily Herald. Joy Mayer of the University of Missouri (left) had previously discussed what students are doing in the new editing model. Photo by Renee Petrina
Merrill Perlman isn’t wallowing in sorrow about the so-called death of the copy editor. Instead, her consulting business gets calls like this: “You know, we let all our copy editors go — now we need help!”
Perlman, the former head of copy desks at The New York Times, shared this story Aug. 11 to a room crammed with more than 75 editing educators at the annual Breakfast of Editing Champions. She was joined on a panel by Joy Mayer, who teaches at the University of Missouri, and Teresa Schmedding, president of ACES.
Andy Bechtel, who teaches editing at UNC-Chapel Hill and is a member of the ACES Executive Committee, organized this year’s breakfast and moderated the panel discussion. The event was part of the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which was held in St. Louis.
The role of copy editor is no longer what it was when ACES began in the 1990s. But as all three panelists attested that morning, the copy-editing profession is evolving rather than dying.
“The skills involved in social media are so perfectly suited to copy editors in a lot of cases,” said Mayer, whose student newsroom at The Missourian has tasked its copy desk with monitoring community conversations online and moderating Web comments. The paper also created a fast-tracked rim-to-Web queue for news updates throughout the day.
But it’s not just students who are adapting. Schmedding is a professional example of multiplatform changes.
At The Daily Herald in suburban Chicago, Schmedding explained that she is now AME of content systems — “Does anybody know what that is?”
Here’s what she did: She broke down the barriers – and floors of a building – that separated the Web producers from the newsroom. She used ACES-sponsored research on the importance of editing to get copy editors into the posting routine. Now, her copy editors consider themselves multiplatform performers.
She said newsroom morale has gone up, with reporters feeling better about their work, especially because it’s not going into “a black hole” on a website with “unseen people” – Web producers — touching it.
Schmedding was “always on” during the breakfast, checking DailyHerald.com on her tablet device and sending a quick email to her staff about photo choice and a potentially confusing headline.
No one on the panel — or in the room for that matter — felt confident affixing a label to what Schmedding was doing.
It’s an evolving role. It’s just what copy editors do, and everyone seemed to agree on that. A job title, however, proved elusive.
“I don’t know what to call us,” said Perlman, who also leads the ACES Education Fund. “We’re communicators. We are the people who make other people’s messages clear.”
A few possible new titles were tossed around. Content editor was one — though Perlman and others frowned over “content.”
“I hate that word,” she said.
An attendee’s suggestion of “reader advocate” drew loud applause. There’s still no consensus, of course. (Perhaps a session at the next ACES conference is in order?)
But if the term “copy editor” is indeed dying — what will we call this phoenix that is rising?
