Copy editors laid off more
than other newsroom staffersCan newspapers’ credibility afford the cut?Quote:
By Natascia Lypny
Kim Covert remembers the “dead silence,” broken by muffled crying.
She and two dozen other copy editors were clumped around the large central table in Postmedia Network Inc.’s newswire office in Ottawa. The group, which gathered national and international news and copy edited it for use in Postmedia newspapers across the country, gaped at the company’s vice-president of editorial operations, Lou Clancy, as he announced Canadian Press was taking over their jobs. It was cheaper; they were fired.
“We all kind of looked at each other and thought, ‘What the fuck?’ because most of us hadn’t expected any such thing,” says Covert. “My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, my mortgage,’ and my stomach just fell.”
The copy editors took turns filing into a private office where Clancy and their managing editor, Christina Spencer, echoed the announcement, explained severance packages and offered pleasantries.
For the rest of the week, they worked in a “graveyard,” says Covert, where you were either dead or one of the five or so guilty survivors Postmedia had decided to keep on.
“The impression that we got was that there was no plan,” says Covert’s colleague, Douglas Beazley, one of the —at the time — lucky survivors, “that everything was being done in a panic; that it was just people firing off in all directions because they genuinely didn’t know what to do.”
Beazley’s right: newspaper publishers are panicking. Print media is starving for profit, and publishers in Canada and the United States are compensating by thinning their newsrooms by thousands of workers.
Copy editors have been sacrificed more than any other newsroom category. Nearly a third of the copy editors who were working for American daily newspapers in 2007 are no longer employed in those positions today, according to an American Society of News Editors’ survey of 985 publications. In Canada, Postmedia not only shut down its newswire in May, it also severed the copy editing staff at some of its major publications, like the Montreal Gazette and The Ottawa Citizen.
[
King's Journalism Review, Nova Scotia] [Hat tip: John McIntyre]
Update: The
ASNE survey mentioned in this story. Some of those copy editors may have been renamed page designers, but still the society should plan on its next name change being to the American Society of No Editors.
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