The Editor’s Desk

The News & Observer has kindly published my review of “The Subversive Copy Editor,” a book by Carol Fisher Saller. Here’s the blurb-able part of the review:

Saller’s point of view is clearly that of an editor who works for an academic press. Yet her straightforward, sometimes witty, approach will benefit anyone who spends time writing or editing — something many of us do in the workplace every day.

Read the full review here, and visit the book’s official site.

Pam Robinson at Words at Work has taken note of yet another article about the future of newspapers. This piece, posted on The Moderate Voice, mentions some ill-considered advice from an editor at a New Jersey newspaper:

Restructure the newsroom. Half of the journalists are involved in the “processing” of news — copy editing, writing captions, laying out pages — as opposed to the generation of journalism. Concentrate on journalism that matters. And “focus on good writing. Tales well told.”

Robinson smacks down this argument, pointing out the valuable rewriting and fact checking that copy editors do. (It’s a point also made in a widely discussed column by the Washington Post’s ombudsman.) Robinson also mentions the necessity of production — copy editors and page designers are the ones who put the pieces together for print media. If they don’t do that, who will?

I’d like to build on Robinson’s response and suggest that copy editors are journalists, or “storytellers.” Here’s how:

• Copy editors write cutlines. Most photographs need explanation and detail that link them to the text they go with. In standalone photos in print and in slideshows, the captions and images must work together to tell a story. Either way, copy editors make that connection.

• Copy editors are experts on story structures. That makes us essential in deciding what form best matches the stories we are trying to tell.

• Copy editors write headlines, which both reflect the story text they accompany and tell stories on their own. Indeed, many headlines are just as memorable as the stories themselves, if not more so.

These are just three ways that copy editors are storytellers. We are journalists, just like the reporters, photographers and page designers in any newsroom. We believe in the importance of “tales well told” as much as our colleagues do.

In short, we generate plenty of journalism. Is that so hard to see?

I caught a bit of “The O’Reilly Factor” on Thursday. Bill O’Reilly, the titular host of the program, was talking about David Letterman’s recent jokes about Gov. Sarah Palin. Some of the jokes mentioned Palin’s family, prompting some to say that the humor was out of bounds.

The O’Reilly segment included a list of newspapers that he said had failed to cover Letterman’s comments. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were among the newspapers named, and O’Reilly’s guest indicated that the lack of coverage was an indication of anti-Palin bias.

I went to the Web sites of the NYT and LAT to find out more. A couple of simple searches showed that each newspaper has covered the Letterman-Palin flap — in blog form, with several posts on several blogs. For example, the LAT’s popular Top of the Ticket blog has a long post with this headline:

Aging man, 62, jokes about girl, 14 (Letterman on Willow Palin)

This leads to the question: Do blog posts on newspaper sites count as “coverage”? Or is coverage defined as stories in print?

Perhaps O’Reilly and this reader would say the latter. But I think that as journalism expands online and shrinks in print, blogs should be considered a significant piece of a newspaper’s coverage plan.

My favorite scene in “The Jerk” is when Steve Martin exclaims, “The new phonebook’s here! The new phonebook’s here!”

That’s how I feel when a new edition of the AP Stylebook is released. That time is now.

I prefer the stylebook in print, but if you like your style on screen, subscribe to the online edition. You can also follow the stylebook on Twitter.

Gregory Kohs is a marketing research practitioner with more than 17 years of experience in the field, mostly with research suppliers, but for the past two years with Comcast Corp. He is also an Internet junkie, blogger and gadfly, having launched three enterprises on the web since 1995 — two of them for-profit and one of them (the most recent) a non-profit called Internet Review Corporation. In this e-mail interview, Kohs discusses his latest non-profit start-up, which publishes a weekly blog called Akahele.

Q. What is the objective of Akahele?

A. Akahele.org is actually the communications arm of a registered non-profit group that I co-founded, the Internet Review Corporation. The word “akahele” means “careful” or “cautious” — the opposite of the word “wiki.” Our mission is to draw attention to unprofessional and unethical practices and content on the Internet. We strive to present complex issues to the average citizen, while deepening our commitment to values like respect for others, personal responsibility, high-quality information, attribution of work and common courtesy.

Q. How can journalists use the site?

A. We see an inordinate quantity of news and opinion stories written by journalists who seem to have affixed rose-colored glasses whenever their focus lands on an Internet-based business or personality. They eagerly sing the praises of Google, Twitter, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, and other Web 2.0 vehicles, without seeming to take a moment’s pause to consider or identify the potentially harmful drawbacks of any of these sites. In a way, it’s ironic, because there’s a strong argument that Web 2.0 is very much killing the standards and value of traditional journalism — imagine a flu patient hammering the nails into his own coffin!

Akahele.org takes a very measured, cautious (dare I say “skeptical”?) view of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Good journalists who wish to add an offsetting viewpoint to the “rah rah” journalism that permeates today’s mainstream are encouraged to read any of our weekly archived articles at Akahele.org. Participate in the comments field, or — better yet — submit a guest article to further explore the problems we’re facing on the Internet.

Q. You are a critic of Wikipedia. What is it about the site that bothers you the most?

A. Let me clarify. I was rather hopeful that Wikipedia could become something extremely valuable, if it were supervised and led by professionals who have the understanding, care and experience needed to manage information and scholarship. Instead, the Wikimedia Foundation that hosts Wikipedia is clearly intent on a “hands off,” “let the community decide” approach to knowledge management. The result is a haphazard, even ridiculed, end product. Indeed, it is difficult to find anyone at all on the WMF board of trustees who has any experience whatsoever in publishing quality content.

Thus, society is treated to not only “user-generated knowledge,” but also “mob mentality” resolution of any content disputes. Corrective edits are reverted by administrators who dislike the personality or tone of the editor who is actually correct about the topic. Experts are routinely driven off the project by teenagers. In so many ways, Wikipedia has become as much an online revenge platform as it is an encyclopedia, and the leadership who literally and figuratively own the servers don’t do anything to challenge this because that might be seen as interfering with “free culture.”

And that’s really my key objection to Wikipedia. What started as a project to build a useful, accurate, dependable encyclopedia has transformed into a pep rally for the “free culture movement.” If I may borrow a summary issued by my friend and independent scholar of inquiry systems, Jon Awbrey: All of that good content on Wikipedia is parasitic on prior traditions of research and scholarship that the wiki-parasite is destroying as quickly as it feeds off its host.

Q. As the traditional media struggle financially, what do you think the future holds for the standards of truth and verification in the press?

A. My view is terribly pessimistic, and it saddens me. I’m also not trained in the practice or management of journalism enterprises, so my opinion isn’t worth much here, I’m afraid. But my observation is that public relations puff pieces apparently are more effective at selling advertising than are hard-hitting investigative challenges to the status quo.

I hope and pray that there still is a market segment out there like myself, who is both tired of such repetitive regurgitation of press release content and government-issued “talking points,” who would be very willing to pay (on either a subscription or, preferably, a per-use basis of micro-payments) for the output of a journalism team that truly breaks open new stories, backed by difficult-to-obtain facts and eyewitness testimony. While I’m resigned to the conclusion that perhaps 80 percent of people won’t pay for the values of truth and verification, maybe there’s a market for it among the remaining 20 percent.

What is it about North Carolina and newspaper names that confuses the national media? This example, from this story at The Hill, mashes up the identities of the state’s two largest papers, a common error.

Sure, they both have “observer” in their names, and both are owned by McClatchy. A cynical person may blame the confusion on the merger of the papers’ sports, state government and features departments, a cost-cutting decision that’s led to layoffs.

Truth be told, it has become harder to tell the papers apart. Things were more interesting when they were competitors, journalistically if not financially.

Yet it seems unlikely that the likes of MSNBC, Politico and The Hill are following the machinations of McClatchy that closely. You have to be here to see it happen day to day.

So, here’s what the national media need to know: The Charlotte Observer is in Charlotte. The News & Observer is in Raleigh. They are separate cities and newspapers, at least for now. And Charlotte isn’t Charleston.

UPDATES: John Robinson of the News & Record shares similar tales about the Greensboro paper, and Under the Dome offers a guide to D.C. journalists covering North Carolina.

(Hat tip: RTB.)

Students in my Advanced Editing course are contributors to The Editor’s Desk this semester. They are free to write about whatever they wish, provided that the topic fits the theme for this blog: “thoughts on editing for print and online media.”

Oh, Wikipedia. An online encyclopedia sounded like a good idea, but the site that professors warned us about is teeming with mistakes and bias.

It’s been three months since Wikipedia said it would consider restricting who could make edits to pages. The new system would allow only reliable users to make immediate changes. Other contributors’ changes would not be posted until a reliable, registered user had approved the change.

What’s the holdup?  The German Wikipedia has been using this system since May. Wikipedia needs to adopt the system soon to rid the site of ridiculous and untrue statements.

Adding in an extra layer of editing would eliminate biased and ignorant users who use Wikipedia as a sounding board. It would also protect honest users like my roommate who make researched and thoughtful changes.

Some argue that the German system is too labor-intensive and takes too long to update. Here’s a suggestion: Find some jobless journalists who already have the investigative skills and editing know-how and put them to work at Wikipedia.

Can’t wait for Wikipedia to get its editing act together? Switch to Citizendium, where experts write reliable and quality articles. Created by one of the founders of Wikipedia, the site is catching on and chock-full of information.

And to the vandals: Save the political views for message boards or dinnertime debate. Better yet, get a blog.

Students in my Advanced Editing course are contributors to The Editor’s Desk this semester. They are free to write about whatever they wish, provided that the topic fits the theme for this blog: “thoughts on editing for print and online media.”

Ashton Katzer, a UNC-Chapel Hill senior majoring in journalism and English, plans to pursue her love for traveling by working for a travel magazine after college. She has a passion for Tar Heel basketball and all things related to Tudor England.

Recently, users on the Web site Twitter, which allows people to post short messages of 140 characters along with pictures from computers or cell phones, have been breaking news before traditional news media. Examples include the Mumbai attacks and the Amsterdam plane crash. With a micro-blogging site disseminating news first, traditional news outlets are going to have to evaluate their news judgment and find different angles to the news.

Because Twitter eliminates the freshness of a news story even quicker than online news sites, the other news elements are going to become that much more important. Even though Twitter broke the Hudson River plane crash story, the The News & Observer wrote a story that used a local angle, writing about Nick Gamache, a sales engineer from Raleigh.

Some media outlets have decided to join Twitter and post their own “Tweets” about the news-gathering process. Doing this shows that the traditional can mix with new. Doing this also allows reporters to break news before other news outlets if they are at the right place at the right time. And since more judges are allowing Twitter to be used in the courtroom, reporters have the opportunity to give immediate updates on trials.

Even Washington has discovered Twitter, with senators like John McCain and Claire McCaskill regularly posting to Twitter. Also, some congressmen were Twittering during President Barack Obama’s presidential address on Tuesday, Feb. 24, allowing their “followers” to immediately know their perspective on what the president was saying.

This is something the traditional news media have no way to do. Now the people, whom journalists are charged to watch over, are able to tell the news before the media can, and that means that the news media are going to have to work even harder to offer a fair, balanced and accurate picture of the political scene.

While Twitter has the advantage in getting big news events out to the public first, the traditional news media can use this tool. By simply browsing Twitter regularly, reporters can get ideas for new stories that they otherwise wouldn’t know about, including the big stories that everyone wants to know about. This approach could improve news judgment in newsrooms.

Users on Twitter can break the news, but 140 characters can only say so much. It’s up the traditional news media to take the news Twitter breaks and expand on it, giving context and making sure the facts are right.

The Wall Street Journal made a mistake this week in an editorial about President Barack Obama’s recent news conference. The WSJ board questioned Obama’s use of a list of reporters to call on, suggesting that a more spontaneous session would be more in line with the new president’s pledge of openness and transparency. Here’s where the WSJ goofed:

We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with prescreening his interlocutors.

Indeed, as documented by Glenn Greenwald at Salon, Bush used a similar list, with some reporters exiled to “Siberia,” never to be called on. It’s a practice that Bush “got away with” for eight years.

The Journal usually takes care in its word choices and phrasing. Could this mistake have been prevented? Of course. That’s where editing comes in.

Romenesko made a connection between this error and the Journal’s recent decision to close its news library. Perhaps that unfortunate move will lead to more fact errors in the paper’s news stories and editorials. But the Bush error could have been caught by a copy editor. Opinion pieces need editing too — and not just for style, punctuation and grammar. Copy editors can check facts and ask questions, just as any journalist would.

More on the editing of the editorial and op-ed pages in this interview with Burgetta Wheeler of The News & Observer.

Michael Scott, the blowhard boss on the U.S. version of “The Office,” has this to say about Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.

Alas, that may be changing soon, as reported by the BBC:

Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, is proposing a system of flagged revisions, which would mean any changes made by a new or unknown user would have to be approved by one of the site’s editors, before the changes were published.

Some will dislike this change. But it’s obvious to many of us that Wikipedia is too open to mischief and ignorance, most recently in the false reports on the “deaths” of Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd.

For more on the Wikipedia debate, be sure to check out this series of recent posts at You Don’t Say.