Maggie Walter, Chris Barr, Merrill Perlman and Henry Fuhrmann were the voices of this year's closing session Saturday.
“The copy editor is dead. The content editor is alive.” @meperl to #ACES2011
Not long after it was posted, that tweet by @ljthornton (Leslie-Jean Thortnon of ASU’s Cronkite School of Journalism) was a top tweet on the #ACES2011 hashtag search on Twitter.
Both tweets reflected comments made by Merrill Perlman, a consultant and retired director of copy desks at The New York Times, during “The Future of Editing,” the closing session at the American Copy Editors 15th national conference in Phoenix.
The message from the panelists — Chris Barr, senior editorial director at Yahoo; Maggie Walter, of University of Missouri School of Journalism; Henry Fuhrmann, assistant managing editor for copy desks, the library and standards at the Los Angeles Times; and Perlmann — wasn’t a negative one for copy editors. Instead, their message was that copy editors add value but their roles are changing
The copy (or, perhaps, content) editor’s job is to educate and to make sure that people get the message that is intended, Perlman said. Whether that involves editing on paper, online, video or social media doesn’t matter.
Barr said the future of editing is in finding ways to make your story more social. Editors need to think about how they can create social hooks to pull people into their content, he said.
In a time of convergence, where multiplatform editors may work on print, online, apps and social media all at the same time, Barr says the holy grail is having one CMS (content management system). But, he adds, that’s not going to happen.
“We’re not converging. We’re totally diverging in terms of how we get our information,” he said.
Fuhrmann said the idea that copy editors see things that others don’t is still a vital message. And, he asked, how clear can our vision be when we’re working so far from our readers (like in editing hubs) and there are fewer and fewer copy editors?
The key, he said, is for copy editors to make the point about their value to bosses in the glass offices by making their jobs bigger. Learn more, take a role in more.
Walter said copy editors need to think about who is going to be reading what we’re working on and how their brains will process that information. But she doesn’t see a world without books or print, or where tablets are the only delivery source.
“Not everyone can afford gadgets,” she said. “We’re producing for the elite.”
There is still a need for quality information for everyone, she said, and that means there’s a role for copy editors.
