In 2007, ACES created an award recognizing people and organizations that have contributed to the society and the craft. It is named for Hank Glamann, ACES co-founder and a former national board member. Each year’s recipient is chosen by the Executive Committee of ACES.

Past honorees

2007: Dow Jones Newspaper Fund

The presentation of the award followed the 2008 National Conference keynote speech by Edward Trayes, co-founder and director of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund Editing and Minority Intern Program. Trayes had just spoken on the power of copy editors and their enduring presence, and future, no matter how the industry changes. He later accepted the award on behalf of the fund. The ACES board decided in late 2007 to create a new award recognizing people or organizations who have contributed so much to ACES and copy editing, and it decided to name it after Hank Glamann, an ACES co-founder and former longtime board member. And the board kept it secret from Hank until the award’s announcement in Denver.

The Dow Jones fund has generated hundreds, maybe thousands of quality copy editors over the years—a great many of whom stood up when called upon at Friday night’s banquet. It was the vision of newspaper editors, Trayes said, who believed in supporting generations of budding journalists, and who believed in quality editing. It’s a fine first recepient of the Glamann Award.

2008: Merrill Perlman

ACES awarded its second annual Glamann Award to Merrill Perlman, a distinguished journalist, treasured member and frequent contributor to the society. Perlman is well-known at the annual ACES conferences for “If I Knew Only,” her wildly popular grammar session, which has been a hallmark of every conference since the first.

For 25 years – from 1983 until 2008 – Perlman was a treasure to colleagues, supervisors and subordinates at The New York Times. Indeed she has been a treasure to them even in the months since her departure.

She joined The New York Times in 1983 as a business-section copy editor and later served as chief of the Metro copy desk, an assistant Metro editor, an editor on the Week in Review, manager of copy-desk recruiting, managing editor of the New York Times News Service and, ultimately, for five years, as director of copy desks. In that capacity, she oversaw the hiring and training of about 150 copy editors.

In 1999, she also worked with Allan M. Siegal and William G. Connolly to polish the latest version of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage.

Since Perlman left The Times, she’s been working as a journalism consultant and freelance editor while writing the “Language Corner” column for The Columbia Journalism Review and teaching at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

At Perlman’s farewell party in June 2008, John Geddes, a managing editor of The Times, said this: “… few among us can lay claim as solidly as Merrill Perlman can to being an unremitting force for making us all – both personally and institutionally – the best we can be.” He added: “Merrill cares.”

2009: University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute

The third annual Glamann Award, which recognizes a person or group that has helped raise copy editing’s profile, was presented to the University of Missouri School of Journalism during the banquet at the 14th annual American Copy Editors Society conference in Philadelphia.

The first journalism school in the United States was founded at the University of Missouri on Sept. 14, 1908. Even 100 years ago, Missouri was dedicated to the craft of copy editing.

Its course book for 1908-1912 lists a course called “copy reading” taught by Charles G. Ross. (Ross taught at Mizzou and then went on to work at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch where he won a Pulitzer for newspaper correspondence in 1934. Ross later served as the press secretary to President Harry S. Truman before dying of a heart attack at his desk in the White House.)

That early course description in the academic catalogue said: “Copy-reading and correspondence: This is a study of special feature and special correspondence in newspaper work, the handling of the telegraph, copy-reading, and headlining. It includes laboratory practice in all these lines. Five times a week.”

Since then, Missouri has made the teaching of copy editing an essential part of its journalism curriculum. The University of Missouri’s Journalism School has taught several of our industry leaders with its famous hands-on Missouri method.

Mizzou also has supported copy editing by sending students and faculty members to ACES national and regional conferences, hosting an active student chapter and providing academic support for the ACES 2009 national survey of copy editors.

The University of Missouri, home of the Reynolds Journalism Institute, is constantly evolving along with our industry, yet still maintains high standards for excellence.