Steve Myers of the Poynter Institute is reporting today that BANG – which consists of the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, and a number of smaller titles – and the Denver Post are expected to cut copy editors and “shift” their responsibilities to front-line editors or reporters.

We admit, the decision of how to keep the doors open during these tough times isn’t an easy one. Cutting editing may seem like a no-brainer since you can’t have content to copy edit if you can’t afford to pay any reporters.

To us, it seems a bit of a no-brainer that you’ve wasted all your pay on reporters, editors, photographers, newspapers and websites if you put out content that people don’t understand.

Editing has value — a value that is real and can be measured. Fred Vultee’s research has proved that.

Instead of stamping our feet in frustration, we thought we’d tell you what value you’ll be losing if you cut your copy desk:

1. People will not pay for crap — or at least not enough to keep you in business.

2. A libel suit for a carelessly written story can cost more than a copy editor’s salary.

3. Copy editors are more than gatekeepers. They provide the ability to “connect the dots” among the work of hundreds. They ensure your content reinforces your brand.

4. Readers never forgive publications for misspelling their names.

5. Copy editors can ask the question a reader will likely ask before publication, saving the editors time, resources and apologies.

6. Copy editors are the masters of display type: headlines, summaries, refers, captions, eblast subject lines, Twitter and FB posts.

7. Headline writing is a specialized skill, and headlines can make or break a story in print and online.

8. Reporters think like reporters. Editors think like editors. Copy editors think like readers.

9. Reporters need to focus on reporting. Editors need to focus on directing reporters and shaping the story. The time reporters invest in copy editing, writing headlines and writing display type will dilute that focus.

10. Most importantly, copy editors are your final, objective gatekeepers. They are the ones who are outside the content-producing process who can tell the emperor he’s not wearing clothes. Trust me. You do not want the public to see your content when it’s naked.

Now, we are forming a panel of professors to continue these efforts. Their task will be to serve as our eyes and ears for research relevant to ACES members. They will also suggest ideas for research projects and share their own work in the ACES newsletter and at conferences.

Here are the members of the ACES Advisory Board for Research:

• Doug Fisher, University of South Carolina
• John Russial, University of Oregon
• Leslie-Jean Thornton, Arizona State University

All three are active members of ACES, and they have strong professional backgrounds that complement their academic credentials. Thanks to all three for volunteering to help ACES highlight research that shows what copy editors do and why editing matters.

The intern will work from home and will be paid $600, with the time frame and hours flexible, but equivalent to a semester’s work during the 2011-12 school year. The bulk of the work will be leading up to and during our national conference, which is April 12-14, 2012.

Applicants must be members in good standing of the American Copy Editors Society, however, students may join the society at the time of application. Applicants also should be currently enrolled in college, seeking a degree in the journalism/communications field. Graduates who received their degree in the past three months also are eligible.

This internship is separate from a website and newsletter content intern position announced in August.

The application deadline is Dec. 15. To download an application and for more information, click here.

For more information or to submit a resume and application, send an e-mail to tschmedding@copydesk.org.

April 12-14, 2012, New Orleans

Preliminary Schedule

Note: Days, times and speakers are subject to change.

Thursday, April 12

8 a.m. – Registration begins, Rhythms foyer, second floor

 9-10:30 a.m. – Opening general session, Rhythms Ballroom, second floor

10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. – Breakout sessions

Tiny Acts of Elegance: Editing Like a Writer: Bill Walsh, The Washington Post

Afraid of Math? Take a Number: Rich Holden, Dow Jones News Fund

Copy Editors as Curators: Gerri Berendzen, Quincy Herald-Whig; Sue Bullard, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

A Keen Eye for Graphics: Bill Cloud, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

 12:15-2:15 p.m.– Lunch on your own (theme lunches meet with leader in Sheraton lobby)

2:15-3:45 p.m. – Breakout sessions

The Power of Proofreading: Sherrie Voss Matthews, John Braun and Sherri Hildebrandt

Even Porn Needs Style: Eric Althoff, freelance editor, New Jersey

Writing for SEO, Writing for Social Media: Frank Russell, University of Missouri

Editing in the Academic World: Margaret Alford Cloud, moderator

4-5:30 p.m. – Breakout sessions

Nuts and Bolts Punctuation: Lisa McLendon, The Wichita Eagle

Freelance Editors’ Forum: Mark Allen, Erin Brenner and Sherri Hildebrandt, moderators

Online News Editing: What Works: John Russial, moderator

Small-Staffs Forum: Tim Yagle, Rick Dyer and Julie Marra, moderators

6:30-9 p.m. – Reception, Lagniappe, second floor

Friday, April 13

8 a.m. – Registration begins, Rhythms foyer, second floor

9 a.m.-5 p.m. – Silent auction, Rhythms Ballroom III, second floor

9-10:30 a.m. – Breakout sessions

Editing Study Update: Fred Vultee, Wayne State University

Presenting Yourself: Resumes, Interviewing, Networking: Bill Connolly, retired from The New York Times; Rich Holden, Dow Jones News Fund

Surviving a Redesign: Sherrie Voss Matthews, David Brindley

10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. – General session: Style Q&A with AP and Chicago, presenters: Carol Fisher Saller of CMOS; David Minthorn and Darrell Christian of AP

12:15-2:15 p.m.– Lunch on your own

2:15-3:45 p.m. – Breakout sessions

Business Editing in Depth: 10 Things You’d Better Know: Merrill Perlman, editing consultant (co-sponsored by the Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism)

Editing at a Hub: Todd Kistler, Thom Wright, LANG; Pam Nelson, McClatchy

Alternative Story Forms and How to Get Them into Your Paper: Rob Schneider and Josh Crutchmer, SND

Ethics of the Last Editor Standing: Rick Kenney, Florida Gulf Coast University

4-5:30 p.m. – Breakout sessions

Triage for Editors: Nick Jungman, Wichita Business Journal

Missourian Transition Follow-up: Maggie Walter and Frank Russell, University of Missouri

Lessons from SND’s Best of Print Design/Best of Digital Design: Josh Crutchmer and Rob Schneider, SND

Fault Lines: Dori Maynard, Maynard Institute

5:30-7 p.m. – Silent auction moves to Armstrong foyer, eighth floor

7-9:30 p.m. – Banquet, Armstrong Ballroom, eighth floor

Keynote Speaker: Roy Peter Clark, Poynter Institute

Saturday, April 14

8 a.m. – Registration begins, Rhythms foyer, second floor

9-10:30 a.m. – Breakout sessions

Making sense of “study says”: Fred Vultee, Wayne State University

Financial Editing: The Words you Choose: Christine Steele, Capital Group

Editing Military Coverage: Renee Petrina, Sarah Clagett, Jared Marquis, Amy Gunnerson, all of Defense Information School

Women in Management Forum: Teresa Schmedding, moderator

10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. – Breakout sessions

Inside Readers’ Heads: “Headlinese” : Alex Cruden, editing consultant

Editing Maps and Graphics: David Brindley, National Geographic

Speed Bumps in Editing: Merrill Perlman, editing consultant

Avoiding Burnout: Becca Dyer, Arizona Republic; Rick Dyer, Independent Newspapers

Editing Books: Jim Thomsen, freelance; Katya Jenson, Peachtree Publishers

12:15-2:15 p.m. – Lunch on your own

2:15-3:45 p.m. – Breakout sessions

Jimmy’s World (limited to 20) Bill Connolly, retired from The New York Times

Math is Everywhere! Neil Holdway, Daily Herald

How to Learn a Style Guide in 10 Days: Colleen Barry, IDG Enterprise

How Do I Get There? Copy Editing Beyond the Newsroom: Doug Ward, University of Kansas, et al.

Copy Editors to Multiplatform Editors: Teresa Schmedding, Lisa McLendon

4-5 p.m. – Closing general session, Rhythms Ballroom, second floor

6-8 p.m. – Social, Napoleon House, 500 Chartres Street

Questions? E-mail ACES conference vice president Lisa McLendon at lisamc@copydesk.org.

Among the items on the agenda are planning for the ACES 2012 national conference April 12-14 in New Orleans, planning regional conferences for next year, building ACES membership and expanding member benefits.

As always, all of us on the board are interested in hearing from members about what you want from ACES. You can email any of the board members or send an email to info@copydesk.org.

Of course, as a copy editor, I ought to be. And if my profession didn’t convince me of the necessity of a second set of eyes on my copy, re-reading my personal email would. Many a time have I cringed when re-reading a long email I’ve already sent. It’s difficult to see your mistakes in the heat of composing.

I understand that there are times you need to get breaking news out right away, and big hands make mistakes on small smartphone keyboards. But in most cases, there’s time to have someone else read your copy before you post or at least look over your shoulder before doing the big breaking news tweet.

I’m not the only one cringing. ACES-sponsored research presented at the 2011 conference in Phoenix shows readers, especially those who follow the news closely, prefer professionally edited articles.

If you really want to know what news readers think about grammar and writing errors, read the comments under the stories. There are plenty of commenters who delight in pointing out the miscues of both reporters and fellow commenters.

Still think people just ignore grammar and spelling errors on the web? Consider this. Recently, I was reading an article on a website about upcoming text changes in the Catholic church’s liturgies. The first comment listed was this: “Please fix the misuse of ‘their/there’ in paragraphs 19 and 25.”

It’s nice to know some people still care.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln students in one of ACES board member Sue Burzynski Bullard

Need to conquer the comma, get a handle on hyphen or decipher the dash?

Or are you thinking about all out extermination of the doubled exclamation point?

Than you might want to start your crusade at the National Punctuation Day website.

Saturday, Sept. 24, is the eighth annual National Punctuation Day. And while those of us who work with words might see the day as a opportunity for a bit of fun (and cookies), it’s also an opportunity to promote the proper use of marks that help clarify the meaning of written material.

Punctuation is important. As the Purdue Online Writing Lab says in its punctuation section: “When speaking, we can pause or change the tone of our voices to indicate emphasis. When writing, we use punctuation to indicate these places of emphases.”

Purdue’s OWL site is a great resource for clarification on punctuation issues. Other online resources are listed on the National Punctuation Day resources page.

So on Saturday, don’t just cringe at those unnecessary quotation marks (“Sale today on ham shank’s”), educate.

It’s gratifying to hear them talk about how valuable ACES has been to them as students. They are so pumped up about how cool it has been to meet professionals and network with ACES members at regional and national conferences.

As an example, they told new recruits this week about meeting David Brindley of National Geographic at the ACES national conference in Phoenix last spring. After the conference, David skyped with our chapter to talk about editing graphics. And last summer when a couple of our members were in Washington D.C., he graciously took them on a tour of National Geographic and out to dinner.

The professional editors who spend a few minutes chatting with students at ACES conferences or mentoring them via email and Skype are having a huge impact on the next generation of journalists. I hear them talking about Merrill Perlman’s suggestion that ACES is about content editing. I love hearing them tell new students about how they’ve met editors at newspapers, editors working for Groupon, editors working for financial institutions or government agencies. And you can just see the new recruits light up, thinking about future career possibilities.

So if you’re an academic or if you’re a professional editor living near a university, think about getting more students involved in ACES this year. For students, as you can see from this video, the ACES experience is awesome.

More than two months with plenty of precious sunlight have passed, and some discussion on the matter has been attempted, such as by our president Teresa Schmedding who posted her thoughts and asked for feedback on whether the night copy desk is dead. I was surprised to see the response both to Yelvington’s and Teresa’s blog posts were about as quiet as a newspaper newsroom after 7 p.m. So, as I am in a better state of mind (and Blagojevich’s profanity-laden tapes have helped land him prison time), let’s really ponder this.

Is the night copy desk dead? Well, no. But it’s evolving, and has been, rather quickly, for a few years now.

Of course we’ve seen the extreme cases of whole copy desks being unceremoniously dumped, victims of consolidation, like Raleigh, N.C., or Winston-Salem, N.C. The Washington Post seemed to indoctrinate the era of the slimmed-down night desk when it moved a lot of copy editors to daytime shifts and created “associate editors,” the idea being to shift the copy editing earlier in the process (and cut costs). The Columbia Missourian embarked on a similar experiment recently with the Web in mind, as Gerri Berendzen wrote recently. For many, many copy desks nationwide, the rim-slot concept has been abandoned; not all stories are getting two copy-desk reads anymore, and increasingly such selective double-editing is … OK.

Now I must admit, I come at this with some emotional attachment. The night desk is cool. Some copy editors on the night desk actually like working nights. We’re an odd breed. We don’t have a need to see the bosses for a full shift, to watch morning news shows, to drive in rush hour, to see extended family — hey, I didn’t necessarily say this is healthy. But our gallows humor sure is fun. Yet, our taste for the night desk has more to do with the old feeling that “this is where the action is.” The biggest news goes on page 1 and the A section. Most newspapers are morning papers, so the deadlines are late at night. The A section and page 1 gets done in the wee hours, the last thing that’s done. So that’s when we want to work.

Except this is not all true anymore. Now the action is … anytime. News of the Japan earthquake and tsunami started breaking around 1 a.m. my time. News of damaging thunderstorms hit my area recently around 8 a.m. And then another day around 2 a.m. Yet another day around 9 p.m. The golden Rod Blagojevich verdict was announced around 1 p.m. Really, the action always could happen at any time; it just couldn’t get published until the morning paper. Now it can be published anytime, too. Therefore, editing must happen at any time, not just at night. It’s really rather logical, if you think about it. In fact, we nightsiders want editing to happen; we want a better website.

So is the night copy desk dead? We still need a night desk, as well as an overnight desk, a dawn desk, a back-at-work desk, a lunchtime desk, and an afternoon rush hour desk. Granted, the “lunchtime desk” may be one person, but the point is, copy editors are needed at all times. Oh, and there is still that print edition to produce (in most places); if you need the staffing to do it, you need the staffing to do it. Maybe someday there won’t always be a print edition. Maybe they’ll shift back to afternoon papers. Maybe they won’t print every day. Whoa, hey, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Illinois boy.

Yelvington had a point in his blog post: The editing can’t be relegated to the last task in the assembly line anymore. It must happen earlier, throughout the cycle. Really, that’s good for us. We just might not always work nights in the future. That might be good for us, too.

The short answer: ACES has money in neither, and the Education Fund has money in both. Also, ACES and the Ed Fund have money in junk bonds.

And am I worried this week about where this money is? Well, no more than I usually worry about where the money is as part of my job as treasurer.

When I became treasurer of ACES in 2005 (and for the Education Fund for that matter), I continued what previous Treasurer Carrie Camillo started and put ACES’ reserves and the Education Fund’s scholarship money in bank CDs and money market accounts that were paying as high as 6 percent annually at one point, but generally around 5 percent annually. I also put a lot of the scholarship money in mutual funds. More on the Education Fund later.

Ah, the days of generous, no-risk bank rates. I have always aimed for an annual return, from whatever investments, of 5 percent — a good level of income without taking too much risk. For ACES, I’ve been able to get that return on our reserves without ever investing in stocks. I did eventually move money into a mutual fund, Vanguard’s High-Yield Corporate Bond Fund — which invests in junk bonds. That term sounds worse than it is: the mutual fund has been recommended as a good income-producing investment for years, and by using a mutual fund to invest, there’s a lot of cushion should a corporation actually default on bonds we buy. We’ve gotten about a 7 percent annual return from that fund for about five years now.

The danger comes if I have to sell our shares of the mutual fund for cash. That’s a concern now as the share price is fluctuating wildly this week, but we’re still nowhere near losing a bunch of money as a result. And it’s looking like I won’t have to cash in shares for a while — hopefully I won’t have to at all for a year or more. I did have ACES’ reserves in other Vanguard bond mutual funds, of the investment-grade variety (better quality), and I had to cash most of them in as ACES has suffered deficits — and I cashed them in with sizable profits, as it turns out.

I used the Vanguard junk-bond mutual fund for the Education Fund, too. There it also has yielded us about a 7 percent annual return, for five years. I’ve also used Vanguard’s Intermediate-Term Investment-Grade Bond Fund, which invests in quality corporate bonds and (drum roll) Treasuries! I bought shares of that fund cheap in March 2009 (after the last of good-paying CDs we had matured), got about a 5 percent APY on it, and then sold shares at a big profit as share prices began to drop in December. I’ve since put that money in Vanguard’s Long-Term Investment-Grade Bond Fund, which again invests in quality corporate bonds and Treasuries, and which again is giving us about a 5 percent APY right now.

The cool thing about the Education Fund is that it acts as an endowment, where we get our scholarship money off the investments’ income. So we hope to never have to cash in shares of the mutual funds. (I did with the intermediate-term fund only because I saw the big profit opportunity that I thought we’d lose.) If the funds keep paying 5 percent or better, we’ll keep the money in there!

I do also have a third of the Ed Fund’s scholarship money in Vanguard’s famous Wellington Fund, two-thirds of which are invested in … stocks. The Ed Fund hasn’t lost money on this fund, but it hasn’t done for us as much as I would have liked. The goal with this fund when I put money in it five years ago was the money would grow and help to provide that self-sustaining endowment. The Ed Fund became self-sustaining through donations first, so I’ve been waiting for the value of Wellington to grow enough where the Ed Fund wouldn’t lose money on it so I can drop it and put the money in another income-producing investment. This week isn’t helping in that endeavor. So I’ll wait some more. Meanwhile, Wellington does generate about a 2.5 percent APY for the Ed Fund.

I’m monitoring all of ACES’ and the Education Fund’s investments constantly. I’ve got alerts set up, I’ve got my websites, I’ve got my Quicken files. And I follow the popular advice that you’re hearing (or should be hearing) a lot this week: Think long term, and don’t make rash moves based on a single day’s or week’s results. I’m making sure your membership money and scholarship donations are safe and helping all of us.