As opposed to?

G-Fin · **Posted:** Mon Jan 21, 2008 8:39 pm

Quote:

The Strand is looking for a copyeditor who also knows how to edit copy.

trimtofit · **Posted:** Mon Jan 21, 2008 11:41 pm

A sad commentary on the state of affairs perhaps. Or maybe just poor copy-editing?

Wabberjocky · **Posted:** Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:57 pm

We've gotten into this many times before. It seems that most journalism job ads are posted by HR people rather than newsroom folk. In a perfect world, newsroom folk would get to vet the ads before they're posted, but ... well, you know what I was going to say next.

I've gotten into the habit of e-mailing such ads to the editors of the advertised publications. Usually, a) they're grateful for the heads-up; and b) they had no idea grotesqueries such as this were representing their workplace among their peers.

Wayne Countryman · **Posted:** Tue Jan 22, 2008 3:13 pm

Wabberjocky is right about HR folks needing to have their ads edited.

But perhaps this ad is accurate.

At many publications, "copyeditors" "design" sections, and only then, if time permits, read the copy before slapping a hed on it.

longwords · **Posted:** Wed Jan 23, 2008 9:08 pm

The paper where I work had paginators when I started, which was less than 10 years ago. The publisher had been an editor before rising to publisher. The paper got out on time regularly.

The next publisher came from advertising. That publisher got rid of the newsroom paginators, mostly because the jobs were "frozen" when paginators left, which paginators did with regularity. They found jobs that paid better or had better hours at other papers. Getting out on time was a struggle, and the publisher blamed the newsroom.

The next publisher came from accounting. That publisher was talking to the regional vice president when it came out that the newsroom had two clerical workers, an obit clerk and two part-time editors who edited and paginated special sections. One clerk was laid off right away. The part-timers were all eliminated because their jobs could be consolidated with work other people were doing. The deadline for the paper was moved an hour earlier.

The paper continued to be profitable and mostly made plan, but was doing so by cutting "expenses." Every open position was reevaluated. The salaried copy editors who left were replaced by hourly copy editors whose job descriptions matched those of the long-gone paginators. The publisher didn't want to have so many editors, because editors are chiefs and not indians, but the editor explained that laying out pages is what copy editors "do."
Positions took 3 to 12 months to fill (for no discernable reason other than corporate demanded a line item for the amount of money that would be saved when positions "went black"). The deadline for the paper was moved back again, and the staff started laying out most of the paper the afternoon before, because there wasn't enough time in the morning to produce a p.m. and still be awake on the weekend to put out two a.m. editions. We put out a product that has 2/3 the number of pages it used to have with 2/5 the number of staff members.

So, in my limited experience, copy editors lay out pages because paginators have been eliminated.

A sort of mirror image to this development is that all of the reporters now do more clerical work than they used to, which takes away from their reporting time.

Wayne Countryman · **Posted:** Wed Jan 23, 2008 9:33 pm

At my first four daily papers, most people edited and did layout on a regular basis.

The change toward specialization largely coincided with steps toward pagination.

Now, everyone is computer-literate and staffs are smaller. So, duties are combined at many papers.

More important, people are working faster and often longer.

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