Newspaper Editing: Escape into Modern Times?
Time for newspapers to get out of the Industrial Age and into the Digital? Alan Mutter makes a great point of wretched editing excess and he’s apparently hit a good nerve in the industry, in his post, “Can Newspapers Afford Editors.” (Maybe excessive editing, no, but good headline-writing’s always a winner.) And that got me thinking about a recent conversation with AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll.
Alan conjures up visions of Chaplin’s Modern Times, describing the many hands that each newspaper story passes through. He makes the case (using a little chart in which, of course, one commenter found a typo) that newsroom operations can’t compete against web standards, especially those coming online in the age of bloggers. Especially noteworthy is how much editing daily newspaper reporters’ own blogs are getting these days. That’s been a bone of contention as reporters started blogging. It should be, and some newspapers have used the innovation to re-think editing standards. Mutter’s case: Re-think some more and cut costs where you can without reducing journalism quality.
He’s right, of course, as long as such cuts are made with some thinking and not with blunt-force cutting. Which is of course is what will happen soon, given revenue declines.
It’s funny. I’ve begun noticing cracks in the usual perfectly editing armor of my hometown newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. Typos on page one, headlines that don’t track, missing jumps. To Alan’s point, the editing quality reduction has already begun. Now though it’s a runaway train, and better for an engineer or two to re-engineer the process.
As is the case with lots of rethinking, it is often the wire services that can be ahead of the pack. The wires — principally AP and Reuters — will be winners in the Internet age. They are global in their reach — lots of customers beyond “local” — and are used to creating lots of external relationships to do their business, again unlike newspapers. And both are adding staff, creating lots of video (1000 segments a month each). But to the point of re-thinking the very basic of “editing”, AP’s already there.
I recently talked to AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll. AP is the midst of re-orging its US operations into four regional bureaus. As part of that process, it has had a task force looking at how it does its business.
The biggest epiphany: “There was one nothingburger tropical storm story, and it was handled by 46 people, and they weren’t doing anything substantive, putting in code…We were all gobsmocked.[Find that in the AP Style Book]” says Kathleen.
“Look at a map of the US and there’s a circuit for each state. For a story that occurred in Maryland, but was of interest to Texas, an editor in Texas had to mark the story with a note and send it on a circuit to Texas.”
Though AP had tasked the task force to find such inefficiency, when AP’ers stepped back and looked at how they operated, they were shocked.
“We knew there was a lot of work involved. It was really horrifying.”
So now AP is moving on the report, movement that includes “reorganizing in the US that will replace human transmission. Technology will liberate us from transmission.”
And the payoff: “These efficiencies will free up resources for more reporting.”
Exactly. And though AP’s complexity greatly surpasses the average daily newspaper’s, the issues are the same. Re-think. Re-work. And then Report.