Toronto Star copyeditor edits memo announcing the elimination of copyeditor jobs

A copyeditor at the Toronto Star greeted the news that union copyeditor jobs were being eliminated in favor of freelancers by heavily editing the publisher's memo announcing same, pointing out all the ways in which the publisher could benefit from editorial aid.

This is very funny stuff, but having looked at the markup, I have to say that I would ask for a different copyeditor in future. A lot of these edits ("avoid simplistic qualifiers" for "very") fall under the heading of "creative disagreement" not "helpful suggestion" or "correction." I've generally benefitted from copyeditors who know the difference, but on the rare occasion where I've had to deal with a couple hundred pages of redlines by a copyeditor who thought that he was my co-author, it's been quite a struggle.

Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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benher

The only cure for someone who uses “core capabilities” in an article about anything… let alone twice in one paragraph… is gasoline, bleach, a rusty screwdriver, and fire.
Bray_beast

Captain Kebab: I don’t think that the editor missed the point of the shitty professional letter. I think his editing intentionally points out how much he prefers the lack of bullshit in a well written news piece.
Anonymous

There is a big different between copy-editing a book and copy-editing a newspaper article. It is completely appropriate for a newspaper editor to point out cliches, redundancies, jargon, etc. While it may be considered a “stylistic choice” for a book author (or really any author who is being paid for his or her own unique voice) to write in this way, a newspaper writer is typically expected to write in the voice of the newspaper itself. The copy-editor is the person whose role is to make sure that voice is consistent and appropriate.
Reid

While you might think of that kind of editing as “creative disagreement,” eliminating unnecessary words (and words that are too big) is quite important for a newspaper.

The newspaper “cost-per-word” ratio is a bit out of whack compared to books, so shrinking the number of characters in a given article is important. Using small words and short sentences is also important for another reason — a newspaper’s goal is to be read and understood by just about everyone from all walks of life. I think the general rule is to target a 9th grade reading level.

For a newspaper editor, I’d keep this one, whoever it is…
Plutonium57

In the end the demise of the copy desk, the craft of copyediting, will be seen as one more piece of structure falling off the Titanic of newspaperdom as it goes down in the icy waters of the cyber age. I spent nine years on a night desk copyediting on a midsize paper in the Northeast and loved the work and the camaraderie of the rim–especially the late-night bull sessions after deadline, waiting for the papers to come up from the pressroom. But alas, the ship is sinking and the outlook is colder than the North Atlantic in February. I was lucky. I had other things going to fall back on after I was laid off. But I’ll never forget my comrades and the pride we took in our work, and the laughs we had.
ronbrinkmann

…yes, but had the editor only done a ‘light touch’ cleanup, it never would have been boingboinged now would it?
Anonymous

LOL. Where was the mention of the unnecessary ‘space’ ‘space’ after periods?
ArghMonkey

You guys are all missing the point, this is about the destruction of good full time jobs.

The editor here isent correcting this release because they want to, they are trying to

1. vent
2. show the author is an idiot
3. get a laugh
4. draw attention to the injustice going on.

Stop looking at the bowling ball with a microscope.
gramiq

As a newspaper copyeditor and journalism professor myself, this warms my heart (and yes, to this day, we copyedit with pen-on-paper, at least where I work, not least because it’s the easiest, fastest way to keep track of changes).

I’m going to post this in our newsroom.

Cory, I do take some issue with your assertion of mere “creative disagreement.” If this copyeditor is trying to turn a press release into a hard news story, there’s hardly any room for artistic license. He or she is probably working from an inch-thick style guide.

I’m sure the same copyeditor gives columnists more leeway in terms of individual style.

And I’m also sure that this particular edit was gone over with a fine-toothed comb.
sworm

As a former* journalist, I learnt one thing:

once you’ve written the piece, it’s no longer yours â€” let the editor alter it as they see fit.

It’s less painful that way.

*not a future career journalism students, sorry.
blu

I think a lot of you are missing the point. The memo does not propose eliminating the copy editing, it is proposing eliminating the copyeditors. So, each story will still get it’s editing, but it will not be done by someone on the staff.

Of course, you might still question the wisdom of this. As a general rule, you should never outsource the process that provides your competitive advantage. As a content company, they should be very leery of outsourcing any part of the process that creates content, unless that part cannot provide a competitive advantage. I don’t think that copy editing is in that classification, but I may be wrong. Is copy editing a commodity item?
- Koblog
  
  “It’s” should be “its.”
CaptainKabob

@Bray_beast: I do agree that the editor got the point, and clearly edited the letter from that perspective. At the double meta though, he failed his job as an editor because he did not take into account the letter’s original purpose. Of course, the air gets more rarefied the higher one gets in the meta, so I can concede the point.
noahpoah

A freelancer could have marked up that memo for half the price.
David Nickle

Oh, I feel your pain, Cory. But The Star does have a reputation in Toronto newspapering circles as an “editor’s” paper; the editors are expected to filter copy so as to conform to a particular house style and sensibility. The individual writer’s creative choices are subordinate.

Which makes the decision to contract out editing there such an odd one. It’s hard to imagine an outsourced editor being able to internalize the Star’s style as well as the currently-employed veterans of the Star’s rim.
strumpet windsock

Let’s remember the main point of the exercise was irony, not actually editing the memo for length, accuracy or style.

At the risk of becoming as redundant as those copyeditors though, I will also point out that the inverted pyramid style (condense the story to one sentence of about 20 words of three syllables or less) has more in common with solving jigsaw puzzles or working a wood lathe than it does with writing literature.

And lastly, I haven’t been to India, but the most unintelligible English I ever heard was right in the heart of England. By contrast I remember hearing about several BBC studies which put the clearest spoken English in Dublin and Inverness.

I am just teasing, Antinous, though given the fact that English is already predominantly a lingua franca, and even its native variants are all distinct, I don’t think there is one definitive version any more. It’s not like Germans and their rechtschreibung.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Most trade book publishers switched over to out-of-house freelancers a long time ago. It worked better at first than it does now.

If someone has what it takes to be a copyeditor — they’re definitely a type — they can learn the mechanics and procedures from books or classes. What they don’t learn is the kind of judgement you pick up by working alongside other copyeditors. That reliable judgement makes a big difference.

I’m not saying the Toronto Star doesn’t need to do this. I’m saying they’re cutting muscle, not fat.
strumpet windsock

ooops… I meant george571, not Antinous
princeminski

The papers I read are increasingly in need of simple proofreading; cutting costs in this area is not l;ikely to slow the death of print media. That said, it’s obvious that this particular item is edited within an inch of its life by someone whose livelihood is on the verge of being “outsourced.” I’ve been on both sides of the dilemma of having one’s deathless prose tampered with by philistines; in the long run, most of us benefit from editing.
Tdawwg

I’ve generally benefitted from copyeditors who know the difference, but on the rare occasion where I’ve had to deal with a couple hundred pages of redlines by a copyeditor who thought that he was my co-author, it’s been quite a struggle.

How lovely. Let me tell you sometime about all the interference I’ve gotten over the years from authors who thought they were my co-editors, thought their malapropisms and bad style were “creative differences,” and who didn’t generally understand the process that is publishing. Quite a struggle, indeed.
Jay Acker

Using a better qualifier than “very” is indeed a very common copy editing correction and does not fall under creative disagreement.

It can often just be removed if it doesn’t add anything to the sentence, like in the memo and my very simple examples.
Anonymous

There are very few instances where writing is not very much improved by elimination of the word “very.”
Anonymous

I’ve been a copy editor, a copy chief, and a managing editor. What I learned my first day on a magazine staff: EVERYONE can benefit from good editing. NO exceptions. Why? Good editing strengthens the written message. A good news editor can, and will, push the journalists to bring the right message to the fore. A good book editor can work with a writer to comb the central thread of a story out of surrounding detritus.
If native English speaking freelancers can pass a stringent copyediting test, and are paid well, then the quality of the publication will not falter, However, if like in IT, copyediting is farmed out to people who don’t have a grasp of the essentials of written English, there will go the Toronto Star’s reputation.
Anonymous

Freelancers are paid at contract rate, which is always higher than what staff is paid. The savings comes in when they don’t have to pay benefits to the freelancers. Our newsroom was shaken up and the section editors took a tragic hit. The quality has suffered incredibly. All this when our paper is one of the healthiest around. Management likes to take advantage of external factors that are perceived to have an effect on business, when if fact their effects are minimal at best. But hey – it makes the publisher’s bottom line look better and allows him to buy a new Corvette with his bonuses.
KingH

Just picked this up on Bourque Newswatch and caught the first entry by the “trained copy-editor”, named, “collisionbend”.

He, or she stated, “Any publisher that wants to reduce their costs by cutting copy editors has a death wish.”

Hmmm.

1. The “publisher” is probably human and therefore warrants, “Any publisher who…”
2. “Publisher” in the above quote is singular, but the “trained copy-editor” chose to be politically correct and rather than use the term “his” or “hers” or eliminating the word “their” entirely, failed again.
3. This is a stunning comment: “…by cutting copy editors…” If you are going to go around cutting copy editors, then I suppose it would be a death wish, but cutting copy editor’s JOBS may only be up for a rough beating.

My guess is that “collisionbend” is not a “trained copy-editor” and is, quite likely, out of work.
Hamish Grant

The edits were probably made in India… A sign of things to come.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  The edits were probably made in India.
  
  India has the largest number of English speakers in the world. And they speak it better than we do in the US.
  - weeklyrob
    
    “India has the largest number of English speakers in the world. And they speak it better than we do in the US.”
    
    You’re right, except on two points:
    
    1. I believe that the United States has more than twice the number of English speakers than India. And the United States has something like 10 times more people with English as their first language, which is more to the point when talking about decent copy editing. (Not that there aren’t exception, like glorious Nabokov).
    
    2. They don’t speak English better in India than in America. As has been pointed out, even the native speakers there only speak their version of English as we speak ours. There’s no better. But American copy editors are probably better at editing copy to be consumed by Americans.
    
    Other than those points, I totally agree with you.
  - Tavie
    
    This depends on your definition of “English” and “better”. I work closely with highly intelligent, educated Indian coworkers every day, and their version of English deviates greatly from the English that I speak and hear spoken every day in NYC.
    
    Not putting a value judgment on it, but it certainly does not conform to the Standard American English that I was taught in school. (Neither does my speech, obvs – none of us talk like a grammar book – but I’m just saying, from my experience, your statement isn’t accurate.)
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Well, it would be a bit weird if you picked up the newspaper and saw that someone had a salary of one lakh. I just don’t think that Indian English is any more variant than UK or Australian, when you’re talking about how real people actually speak. I would find a tech support call center staffed with people from North Yorkshire just as difficult to understand as one in Mumbai. Presumably, copyeditors are using a highly formal style which would be very similar in all English-speaking countries.
      - Tdawwg
        
        You’d be surprised at how Anglophone notions of correctness and usage differ from US and British English. Take a quick perusal of any Indian copyediting service online: they’re often quite unintentionally hilarious.
      - Tavie
        
        Don’t disagree at all. I just don’t think that “Indian English” can be said to be “better” than American English.
        
        It is, however, fun – we’ve all taken to saying “I have done the needful” and “Please revert” around the office. Not to make fun of our Mumbai colleagues, but because we find the deviations charming.
  - george57l
    
    Antinous
    I half agree.
    Indians speak Indian English, as opposed to British people speaking British English and Americans speaking American English. As a British English writer often called on to edit Indian English output let me tell you they do not use English of any variety as well as you say. Often they are caught between and produce a mish-mash of all three variants. But if you believe their use of Indian English is better than Americans’ use of American English I’ll go with you on that one.
pitkataistelu

Actually, I agree with nearly all interventions. Avoiding ‘very’ is an elementary norm in academic writing (my own field), and I see good reasons to avoid it in news articles as well.
Teapunk

Outsourcing, and I don’t know how else to say this, this not being my mothertongue and all, but outsourcing really is the source of all evil. It might be cheaper, but it is never better.
Writing and editing is best done when the author/journalist and the editor are used to each other and know each others quirks and so on, it’s a job that really profits when you have some kind of working relationship, at least in my opinion.
Outsorcing makes things rather … anonymous, soulless, automatic – and no text ever profits from that.
mr_josh

AS A HUMAN BEING, I enjoy relating to things.
- octopod
  
  suggest “IAmA human, ask me anything” reddit perhaps?
thehoundoflove

This reminds me of the scene in Some Kind of Monster where Metallica decide they no longer need the services of their group therapist. He doesn’t agree and thinks maybe they should talk about it.
Anonymous

Contracting out jobs outside of a Community, hurts both the Paper and Community. Newspapers are Institutions that reflect…no shape; the culture and morals of its Community. A News Media’s success is directly related to how readers identify with its espoused values; and its part of the Community, as an employer. Moving hundreds of jobs out of the Community can only damage a paper’s branding, as social advocate, community institution, and; the Community’s support. While change is necessary to survive, I hope that the Star will live up to it’s values by using attrition to soften the impact and reconsider the job moves..
ArghMonkey

I think Cory missed the point of the article slightly.

I assume he posted it as a sign of someone frustrated and fed-up with the constant destruction of good jobs in Canada (thanks U.S.A.!!!) but then Cory talks about how some of the points made by the editor are creative differences, I dont think the editor really cares about editing a release like this, the person is just frustrated and fed-up, personally I would have highlighted parts and said “only an asshole would use this word” or “note the lack of a hyphen, clearly the author rapes animals”, if your going to say “IM PISSED OFF!” go for the gold medal …
Inkstain

The symbol in the first line is the symbol North American newspaper copy editors are taught to use for “insert space.”

Not that anyone actually uses editors’ marks anymore.
idontwant2liveinoprahsworld

Hmm…
I have a different perspective.
Having experienced many a corporate shake down I would believe that the announcement could be a “reclassification” of copy editors. That is, a legal move to remove employees from the payroll, insurance and any other benefits common employees enjoy.

I believe it was UPS that was in the news recently as they had lost a court case and could no longer legally classify their employees as being part time. I assume legal departments everywhere are reviewing the fine print.

PS- Please don’t shred my grammar as she was an honorable woman.
Anonymous

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, nothing more. When a daily newspaper starts dumping its copy editors to save money, the wreck is going down.
Anonymous

I would find this to be ironic were it not for the fact that I stopped reading newspapers in the 1990s, mainly because they became unbearable partisan and patronizing.
- Little John
  
  So, “Anonymous” #28: How are things down there in Crawford? Haven’t heard much from you lately. My regards to Laura.
CaptainKabob

To be pedantic: the copyeditor misunderstands the purpose of this letter: you do not lead with a lede in a “bad news” business letter. Instead, as the writer correctly does, you start off with a positive statement, then you bury the bad news in the second paragraph. In the final paragraph, there should be a consolation benefit (“an application for the unfilled janitorial position would receive priority”).

Otherwise, I think most of the edits are right-on.

(I just clicked through the link and sure enough, the full letter follows the format. That class in professional writing was worth it!)
Anonymous

Nice post, thanks for the post and for sharing the very resourceful post here.
Anonymous

Hmmmm a few people need to grow a funnybone in this room. That edit is great. Whoops! my bad. It’s *not* actually an edit, now is it?
What it actually is, is an angry, smart and funny bit of comedy writing by a pro editor who used editing conventions to make a point … while possibly also being fired. Very nicely done. Strike that, meant to say “Nicely done.”
Teresa Nielsen Hayden

“I’ve generally benefitted from copyeditors who know the difference, but on the rare occasion where I’ve had to deal with a couple hundred pages of redlines by a copyeditor who thought that he was my co-author, it’s been quite a struggle.” –?
Anonymous

FYI, newspaper copy editors aren’t copyeditors. Also, yes, we are expected to make stylistic changes of this nature without even consulting the writer.
mgfarrelly

I agree with you Cory about the “co-author” stance some copyeditors take. In college we had two copyeditors, one was fast, effective, and polite. His edits made my section more readable and helped create a consistent style. The other was a guy who would point out that certain kinds of foods mentioned “didn’t pair well” (he was a foodie) and write things like “Is this supposed to be funny? Falls flat”. His “edits” often doubled the amount of time people would spend in the office on a production night.

The pure comedy came during the first semester when the coauthoring copyeditor ended up throwing a tantrum, tossing a pen at the editor-in-chief and getting fired.

Good copyeditors are invaluable. Bad ones are linguistic jack the rippers.
- Tdawwg
  
  Good copyeditors are invaluable. Bad ones are linguistic jack the rippers.
  
  The same could be said, much more strongly, about authors, especially those who simply can’t hear how their language reads, objectively, to others. Horrible.
bauds

Teachers typically use red ink for editing.
Editors use blue ink. Perhaps the editor here
wasn’t taught that procedure.~
Anonymous

Also, the copy editor didn’t do a very good job. Caught the non-ital of the word Star the first time, but missed it two subsequent times. No wonder he/she is out of a job.

-DL
pAULbOWEN

In the UK the symbol in townhall in the first line means ‘line break’ rather than ‘insert space’ which I assume to be the intended instruction. Is it different in Canada?
- strumpet windsock
  
  I always use a vertical line.
  
  I don’t think it is different here, but then I did not learn it in school.
collisionbend

Funny, indeed.

Being married to a copy-editor turned managing editor, and being a trained copy-editor myself, I have to agree with you. But if this editor was given the charge of editing this release for publishing, I have to applaud: it’s excellent work. Any publisher that wants to reduce their costs by cutting copy editors has a death wish.
ValuedRug

You go girl
Avram / Moderator

The original article says “editor”, not “copyeditor”. I’ve never worked at a newspaper, but I get the impression that an editor at a paper has a higher level of control over the writing than a copyeditor at a book publisher.

I think part of the humor here comes from the fact that the memo is written like a memo — full of corporate duckspeak, the important info buried in the second paragraph — and the editor has edited as a news article.
- Notary Sojac
  
  Too bad we can’t see the first marked-up version. The one which starts with a short paragraph announcing “we’re outsourcing the copy editors”, lays it side by side with a buzzword bingo card, and line by line merges the two.
Anonymous

“…which examines how people tend to underestimate their own skill level.” Did you mean to say “overestimate” or am I missing your point? Or did you mean, a la George W. bush, “misunderestimate”?