Gene Zipperlen            Senior Copy Desk Chief  Ft. Worth Star-Telegram  zip@startext.net Create a Climate of Quality  Quality control is a fundamental problem in America's newsrooms, from the reporter who can't add, to the assistant city editor who doesn't see the hole in the story, to the photographer who misspells the subject's name, to the copy editor who gets a fact wrong in the headline or caption, to the layout editor who puts Monday folios on Sunday pages.        No one has to be told how quality control affects credibility, which is all that we have to sell. Here are some suggestions for the near and the longer terms.       First, create a culture of quality and credibility. Talk about them. Ask the staff how to enhance them. Get technical. Let everyone know that we care about technical issues and that ''almost right'' isn't good enough. Teach math. Teach grammar. Teach economy of language and precision of expression. Every day. Teach everyone what CQ really means. Require remedial classes or special sessions for people who have continuing problems.     One-shot grammar and writing sessions are great; do them more often, and use experts on staff. And require reporters, line editors and copy editors to attend.       Establish a regular forum for copy editors, reporters and line editors to discuss these issues. Create a credibility committee and let it direct the effort. Make clear that this effort has the full support of top management, and that quality control and credibility are the first priority from the top down.      Another way to make that clear would be for top editors to ask the copy desk what kind of errors it is fixing. And line editors and reporters could do that, too.        For the longer term, newspapers can do several things to enhance their ability to attract and hire more skilled journalists.  * Help professional organizations in their outreach to younger journalists, even at the junior high and high school levels.  * Establish scholarships and internships for promising journalists -- including copy editors -- and then HIRE THEM.  * Support other education efforts, such as ACES scholarships, the Dow Jones copy editing program and the Maynard Institute.       We may never be able to attract those customers who don't have time to read a newspaper, or who say they get enough information from television. But we must take serious steps to stop losing readers whom we already have, and quality control and credibility are fundamental means.    John E. McIntyre  Copy Desk Chief  Baltimore Sun  johnemcintyre@hotmail.com Credibility and the copy editor   If, as ASNE has found to be the case, mistakes of the most elementary kind in factual matters erode the credibility of newspapers, then copy editors must bear a heavy responsibility for maintaining that credibility     Copy editors are the newspaper's guardians against errors that rise from ignorance, haste and carelessness. This starts on the lowest level of accuracy: names, places, events. If the copy desk lets through a story that locates a town within the newspaper's circulation area in the wrong county, if the paper runs a feature on Charles Lindbergh that omits the terminal "h" in the name in the display type and throughout the text, if the paper gives the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as Dec. 8, 1941, then it is the newspaper that will live in infamy.      Copy editors are responsible for higher levels of factual accuracy as well, as the following examples, all of which got as far as the copy desk of a major metropolitan newspaper, and some of which appeared in print demonstrate:     * He brought a luna moth to school, and recently, when she saw a 14-foot woodpecker, it was he who told her it was a pileated woodpecker, a scarce bird in Maryland. [A 14-foot woodpecker would be a rare bird in any of the 50 states.]     * Silent auction in West County: Among the wonderful items up for sale is a live thoroughbred horse. [What are we bid for a dead thoroughbred?]      * Bennett said the men have shipped an estimated 60 million kilograms of raw heroin, with a street value of “millions of dollars,” to the East Coast since the mid-1980s. [Do the math: That's 66,000 tons of raw heroin.]       * The festival attracted a variety of book-lovers, from intellectuals who read in beautifully lighted conservatories lined with books, to those who fondly remembered long afternoons as children, getting lost in their books. [Putting shelves of books in a greenhouse will benefit neither the books nor the plants.]     * In hindsight, it may seem a logical progression from Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, James Polk’s seizure of one-third of Mexico’s territory and Abraham Lincoln’s coup in buying Alaska from Russia. [Lincoln had been dead for two years when Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska. This sentence appeared in a news analysis written by a senior editor with more than three decades' experience.]       Beyond factual accuracy, the copy editor’s responsibility rises to concern with precision in the language, control of grammar and usage. The goal in writing generally is the same as the goal in writing on specialized topics such as law or medicine: to reach the general reader without exciting the contempt of the specialist. Though highly educated and literate readers may constitute only a portion of our audience, it is not sound practice to let them conclude that we are stupid.       Some examples of sloppy and imprecise usage that a copy desk can and should catch:  * Although boys do get lice, they tend to prefer females. [Ambiguous antecedent to pronoun.]     * Women don’t want to stay home and manufacture babies, which is a tenant of the Orthodox faith. ["Tenant" for "tenet."]    * Far-right groups have pedaled a host of conspiracy theories regarding the government’s involvement in Waco.   ["Pedaled" for "peddled."]    * South Korea is supposed to represent the flip side of the coin: vigorous trade, open borders, democracy, a vibrant ex-patriot community. But even many South Koreans admit theirs is not the most welcoming country on earth. [Writer has heard "expatriate" but writes "ex-patriot."]  * During the next 20 minutes, paramedics arrived, were let in through an emergency exit by the screen and busily loaded the girl onto a guernsey. ["Guernsey" for "gurney."]      And, at the most sophisticated level, the copy editor has a responsibility to protect the paper from excess and bad judgment in the writing itself, in metaphor and expressive language.        Since the writers themselves and their assigning editors do not necessarily have the detached perspective of the copy editor, it falls to the copy editor to sound the alarm when an effect does not come off. Some examples:  *A small, square woman in a T-shirt and sweat pants, with too much eyeliner and hair carelessly pinned up in a horsetail on the top of her head, Smith looks like a truck-stop waitress. [Snotty and condescending.]  * Moon launches are triumphs of computers, engineering, metallurgy and chemical propellants: potent, polished shafts risen on flaming pillars to penetrate the very heavens; the key to virgin frontiers for a race whose home planet is showing signs of wear and tear. [Overheated, to say the least.]  * Aboard the Becky D, Ren Bowman grins with delight as his rod throbs with the energy of a large rockfish. [Almost never a good idea to use "rod" and "throb" in the same sentence.]       Ultimately, it falls to the copy editor to ask, Do we want to do this? Do we really want to do this? That question, asked, pursued and considered, might have spared several American newspapers public humiliation over the past couple of years as they moved into print with stories that were fictionalized, unbalanced, unfair, and disastrous to their and our reputations.       It remains to be seen what newspapers can do to address these issues more effectively. From the perspective of the copy desk, there are remedies.

Melissa McCoy   Foreign Desk Copy Chief  Los Angeles Times  melissa.mccoy@latimes.com This Is Not a Surprise   The results of this study are hardly surprising to anybody who works on a news desk.       I think that you'd be hard-pressed to find a copy chief who doesn't marvel at the fact that more errors don't get into the newspaper considering increased production workloads, earlier deadlines and staff cutbacks.      Add to that computer glitches and an obsession to keep up with TV news, and you've got a recipe for errors. Gone are the days of newsroom proofreaders who often saved even the copy editors from themselves.       But you'll also be hard-pressed to find a copy editor who thinks he or she can't improve. And fewer still who don't cringe when they see mistakes in their own paper no matter who made them. So, how then, to improve quality?      *If your paper relies heavily on pagination and production, add support staff to help with the computer work or risk losing a copy/news editor's editing time to coding. By using pagination, we may cut composing staff, but the work must be shifted somewhere-to someone. If it's shifting entirely to the desk, the final product is going to suffer.        *Hold reporters accountable for introducing errors into stories in the first place. Yes, it is the job of the copy desk to catch every error, and certainly to refrain from introducing errors. But if reporters are permitted to write inaccurate information without being called on it, the entire burden falls to the copy desk.      If the desk catches 10 things but misses one, the desk will oftentimes be blamed for the one error that sneaked through. The only person who knew about the fixes may be the copy editor, who goes quietly about his or her work. Many top managers would probably be shocked at the number of errors a copy desk catches in one day.        *Institute rules that line editors MUST spellcheck every story before sending it over. Sounds simple. You'd be surprised at how many don't do this simple step that can avert errors.        *Enforce deadlines. This is crucial. If reporters are permitted to turn copy in late, especially copy that is not breaking news, the margin for error rises with each tick of the deadline clock. Why should you give a reporter 10 hours to write a story that you expect a copy editor to edit for content, grammar, cohesiveness, style and spelling in 10 minutes? Where is the time for fact-checking? This speaks directly to the ongoing morale problem on news desk. It demeans the work of copy editors. Furthermore, you wouldn't expect a reporter to write a lede in two minutes.       Why would you give a copy editor that little time to write a headline?    Janet Cleaveland  recently became a copy editor at The Oregonian. She previously was news editor for a mid-size daily in Washington State. Problems of the mid-size papers   At smaller and midsize daily papers, problems with accuracy can be sorted into three general categories: no time for the desk, newsroom structural problems and technical glitches.         No time for the desk: Common to all newsrooms, this problem is closely related to attitude toward deadlines. In theory, copy flow charts allow time for the desk; in practice, copy flow is sporadic and lagging. Too often management allows reporters to write on deadline when they are filing stories about an event that happened hours -- even a day -- before.      SOLUTION: Establish copy flow charts, make sure everyone understands them and make reporters and editors stick to them. And if the newspaper is serious about deadlines -- and in theory everyone is -- have the publisher reinforce the philosophy.      SOLUTION: Push some of the responsibility for errors back on source desks rather than letting copy editors take most of the blame.       Here are three examples, two small and one whopping, that seem obvious but escaped the reporter, line editor and the copy editor because of time constraints:  "The slide area is 30 miles west of Long Beach." [That would put the slide 30 miles out to sea.] -- "Cross the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and you're in Marin County." [The Golden Gate joins San Francisco and Marin County.]      A business editor wrote a column describing the great customer service at two companies, while criticizing a regional airline's service in an incident she'd observed at the airport.      But she fingered the wrong airline. The copy editor had no reason to believe she had facts wrong, though he did question the suggestion of a trend based on one incident. His concerns were dismissed because she needed to file the column and had no real way of checking the information three days later on deadline.      Overlooked usage: alter/altar; principle/principal; effect/affect; phase/faze. Basic stuff, but in the heat of deadline these sometimes get into print. And readers notice. They don't care if so-and-so was sick, someone else was on vacation, and it was jamming time.  SOLUTION: Reporters need to share responsibility and read, read, read their copy. The best reporters compare the original version with the edited story, and the best copy editors compare their editing and heads with changes made by the slots. How else to learn?  SOLUTION: Brown-bag lunches, handouts included, on grammar and usage. A newsletter each month on great catches, with quotations from actual copy and explanations of stylistic problems that recur.      -- Phone hangups: Newsrooms need a clear policy on checking Web addresses and phone numbers. A business reporter wrote a story about establishing a tuition account for children.  He gave an 800  toll-free number, and it was cq'd.  But it was actually an 888 number. The first was a porn line; the second, the source of tuition information. The resulting policy was to throw more responsibility on the copy desk to double check  phone numbers and Web addresses.     Newsroom structural difficulties: Top editors who lack copy desk experience cannot be the strong advocates the desk needs at critical times. This can contribute to second-class status for news desks.      Here's an example: When a midsize daily needed to find features and metro editors, the managing editor launched nationwide searches with ads in E&P and finally employed a head-hunting firm specializing in newspaper management. When the same paper needed to replace its news editor, the managing editor hired from within, quickly. Yes, he made a solid choice from the ranks of the news desk, but the attitude toward management recruitment is uneven.        Technology glitches: Big bucks for technology don't always translate into a smooth and speedy operation. QuarkXPress is popular at smaller and medium-size dailies. But pages turned out need close checks on deadline. Here are a couple of examples where technology tripped a news desk:    The wrong television grid was printed when the copy editor didn't follow the convoluted steps set up by someone who didn't understand the technology.     The wrong stock tables were used when a computer person working on a prototype overwrote incoming files with dummy files.      Stories repeatedly were cut off midsentence when the desk was adjusting to the software and computer crashes.      These problems are manageable, but a cautionary tale on technology lies in attitude toward copy editors.      Eight years ago when a midsize daily was planning to move from a mainframe to Macs and QuarkXPress, the news desk editor touted the talents of his copy editors. He was so enthralled with technology that he told the paper's executives that they could  cutting staff in composing and camera and wouldn't need to hire any more copy editors. He wanted copy editors to have scanners so they could scan in photos and have them when they needed them. When he transferred to supervise Web pages, the next news editor faced the task of undoing  the perceptions and struggling to make the case to add copy editors.

 

Hank Glamann  News Editor/Administration  Houston Chronicle  hank.glamann@chron.com Exactly what is a newspaper?      At its most basic level, it’s a product,ink on paper. Consumers are willing to exchange money for it, and presumably they get something of value in return.     Of course, it’s that something of value, the way the ink is arranged on the paper, that’s our business. Headlines, stories, photographs, infographics and innumerable tidbits in a coat of many colors.      News. That’s our product, right?      In fact, news is not our most important product. Credibility is.      Because the value of what we do exists only in the minds of our readers. If they don’t regard our work as worthy of attention, they won’t give it to us.      The credibility of news organizations has taken some serious hits in the recent past. The withdrawal of a Pulitzer Prize. Columnists who turned out to be novelists. Sensational stories published and then retracted.      These headline-grabbing cases have splashed mud on all of us, but there’s more to the problem. Other, more pervasive little viruses are eating away at our credibility every day, in every newsroom.      The American Society of Newspaper Editors’ recently completed study of why newspaper credibility has been declining seeks to identify "the underlying causes of the ‘disconnect’ between journalists and their audiences," in the words of the study’s executive summary.      The study’s major findings are outlined elsewhere. Our concern is identifying productive ways to respond.      Some thoughts:      To reduce the number of factual errors and problems with spelling and grammar, we need to recognize that these issues are everyone’s responsibility.      Too often, we allow such concerns to roll downhill. A reporter will say, "I’m not sure if that’s spelled right, but my editor will check it." The editor says, "Where is my dictionary? Oh well, the copy desk will check it." The harried copy editor, who is busy coding the file, thinks, "Surely the city desk checked that." And, voila, it’s in the paper.      If we have staffers who need to improve their basic skills, then our newspapers should provide skills training. It’s never too late to learn.       It’s also important that we give all members of the staff a reasonable amount of time in which to do their jobs. Copy-flow schedules need to be established and enforced. Editors must recognize the need for deadlines to be met at every stage of the process, not just the last one. Otherwise, we load a disproportionate share of responsibility onto those down the line originating desk editors and the copy desk.      Copy editors, traditionally a paper’s last line of defense, often are deprived of adequate time to be journalists because they’re too busy dealing with production issues.       Any journalist, regardless of job title, should be able to raise any question about any story and expect to be listened to. To restrict who can ask about what is an inefficient use of personnel and an absurd waste of talent.      A copy editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution objected to a column that compared Olympic Park bombing suspect Richard Jewell to serial murderer Wayne Williams. Her concerns were not heeded, and that column is now a centerpiece of Jewell’s libel suit against the paper.       Don’t be so quick to assume that another news organization’s story is accurate and worthy of publication in your paper. Otherwise, you risk compounding a rush to judgment.      And the argument, "Hey, we’re not reporting this, we’re just reporting that somebody else is reporting it" holds about as much water as a sieve. It’s an abrogation of responsibility that is unjustifiable.      Remember that when you use anonymous sources, you're ceding control of your newspaper's content to those sources. In the worst case, they'll tell you whatever serves their purposes, true or not, you print it slavishly and then go to jail to protect their anonymity.      Even in the best case, when you use anonymous sources, you’re often functioning as a public-relations agent, not a reporter.

Those of us who have worked as reporters know the adrenaline rush of covering a breaking news story, and most papers remain focused on breaking news. But we need to recognize the reality of the marketplace in which we operate. If we think we are still a principal source of spot news, we’re deluding ourselves. There’s no way we can compete with broadcasters and Webcasters.       It has been rightly observed that, even though we may not get there first, we can get there best. If we take the time to get it right.     More often than not, the story you’re about to rush into publication today will offer even greater value to the reader tomorrow, if you take the time to make it as good as it can be.     To counter the perception that we don’t know our communities, we need to get out of the office and learn who’s out there -- to spend the time in the field necessary to develop understanding.       No reporter or editor ever gained a feel for a community sitting at his desk with his phone in his hand. Editors at all levels need to reach out to communities, meeting with leaders and assembling focus groups, to learn how to serve them better.       We need to persist in our efforts to make the populations of our newsrooms mirror the populations of our service areas, and to look for alternative means of accomplishing this goal – if not full-time staffers, why not free-lancers and guest columnists?       Be mindful of the powerful messages that can be conveyed by a single word or phrase – choose them carefully. Remember always that not everyone sees the world the way you do.       In terms of addressing concerns about bias, my advice is this: Redouble your efforts to be fair and abandon your efforts to be  objective.     No one can be truly objective. To do so, you would have to be able to see the world through a lens uncolored by your life experiences, and no one can do that.      We do ridiculous and hurtful things in the name of objectivity. When we write a story about political activism on the part of African-Americans, we go and talk to a white supremacist – for balance. When we write a story about domestic-partner benefits for city employees, we go and talk to a conservative Christian who thinks homosexuality can be cured.      One who is fair has a mind that is open but discerning, a sensitivity to the rich tapestry of humanity. Striving toward the goal of fairness is a never-ending endeavor.      Do we oversensationalize stories? Absolutely. And we do it in spite of ourselves. How many times during the Monica Lewinsky mess have you said, "I am so sick of this story," and heard others express the same sentiment? This is while we’re busy putting out five open pages on the story.      We tell ourselves that we’re giving readers what they want, but, if this ASNE study is to be believed, it would seem that we’re wrong.      I think it would behoove us to take a deep breath before we decide to jump overboard. Ask yourself, "How is this story going to contribute to my readers’ lives?" And remember that no one else decides what we print unless we allow them to.    Should we ignore stories like the Lewinsky scandal? Of course not. Should we carefully examine each story to determine how it should be written, if at all, and where it should be played? Absolutely.      As for conflicts between the approaches we take and those our readers want: They tell us that accuracy should be our pre-eminent concern, and they’re right. If we’re not sure about a story, we shouldn’t run it, no matter what the competition does.    Again, we may not be able to get there first, but we can get there best. Let’s give our readers what television doesn’t – stories that explain what it means, why it’s important, how people are affected. No one can do those stories like we can. It’s one of our great strengths and we should showcase it. Each of us must work every day, in everything we do, to earn our readers’ trust.     There’s more at stake than whether we have jobs, or how many papers we sell, though those certainly are not trivial concerns.      Nothing less than the very existence of the Fourth Estate, at least in credible form, and its pivotal role in preserving a free society depend upon our efforts to speak with a credible voice.