A new (old) challenge for copy editors
By Doug Fisher
As if grammar, spelling,
style, and facts weren’t enough of a challenge, copy
editors now have something else they must consider –
the Web.
Except for the largest papers
and a few notable exceptions, like Lawrence, Kan., it’s
still pretty much true that copy is shoveled onto newspaper
Web sites. And therein lies the challenge – and the
opportunity – for copy editors to show that good editing
means taking time-tested principles and applying them with
the knowledge of all media into which a story might be “repurposed.”
No matter how much you might
want them to, many of your Web site’s users will not
be forced through your “front door.” They will
enter various ways, through various links. So every element
must have the necessary context to let the reader/user establish
understanding without relying on other elements.
Yes, that’s basic journalism.
But with our emphasis on design and now on moving stories
across media, sometimes we forget and end up with results
that leave the reader wondering.
A few months ago, a newspaper
wrote about how a gasoline company’s credit card promotion
was angering librarians. It was something about the placards
posted at gas stations, but the story never said why. The
paper’s layout was such that editors hoped it would
force people to look at the picture before reading the story,
and the key was the picture of an advertising placard with
the phrase, “More useful than a library card.”
Whether readers would be
forced into reading through the picture is debatable; each
of us reads differently, often depending on the story, and
sometimes that means diving into a story while barely glancing
at the picture, even the centerpiece. But the real problem
came when the story moved into this paper’s Web template.
The picture shrank to not much more than a thumbnail in
a corner, not in line with the text. Nothing in the story
said exactly why the librarians were upset. The offered
printout, without the picture, just aggravated the problem.
It was a design idea gone
awry. Ultimately the story must be able to stand on its
own no matter what the medium, and the copy editor must
see that it does.
In another case, a newspaper
trying to persuade legislators to pass a bill unleashed
its news columnist on one of its news section fronts. The
column used a fair bit of shorthand and somewhat stronger
and more slanted language than a regular news story. But
when shoveled onto the Web, the byline and signature box
got stripped. The result: What looked like an editorial
in the news section.
Two other examples:
The Web only highlights what
should be true, even on the printed page: Every element
of a story or package should have necessary context and
tie together. Many of your readers scan; they might read
just the sidebar, even in print.
“Landfill deal threatens
S.C. lake, taxpayers,” the headline in a recent newspaper
said. The cutline below the main picture: “Bill Stephens
walks on a plastic liner designed to prevent toxic pollution
from leaking out of the landfill’s burial pits.”
A scanner would not know what lake or what landfill, one
or both of which could have been included in the cutline.
Tom Mangan, a features desk
copy editor at the San Jose Mercury News, noted at the American
Copy Editors Society recently that corporate executives
would like nothing better than to say the Web, especially
with Web logs, makes editing less necessary. It’s
up to us to show, by editing with the awareness of multiple
media and of the increasingly multiple ways our readers
use our media, that it’s more necessary than ever.
