Low Morale, Late Hours Still Plague Copy Desk

By: Randy Dotinga Richard S. Holden remembers the day in 1973 when he walked into a job interview at the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal and declared he'd like to be a copy editor. This, to put it mildly, was very unusual.

The editor, Holden recalls, "got on the phone to the managing editor and said, 'I've got this nut from Missouri who wants to be a copy editor. What do I do with him?'" The managing editor told him to put Holden on a plane to New York City. "'We'll try him out, and if he's good I'll hire him.'"

Holden did turn out to be good, and he was hired. Now, as executive director of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, Holden dreams of finding college seniors with similar enthusiasm for copy editing. But the copy desk still holds the same lack of allure as it ever did. "It's difficult, admittedly, to glamorize the life of a copy editor," Holden admits.

Copy desk chiefs say qualified copy editors remain in short supply, just as they were 30 years ago. On the bright side, copy editors have a six-year-old organization to call their own, and some detect more respect for their work.

"We are perceiving a slowly improving picture," says John McIntyre, president of the American Copy Editors Society, which has 750 members and holds regular conventions. "At many newspapers, copy editors are beginning to get the kind of recognition that their work and skills demand."

But McIntyre adds, "we haven't arrived at Nirvana yet. The work is still anonymous with crappy hours and days off nearly everywhere."

Some hiring editors have noticed that those last two factors have become an especially hard sell. Young journalists seem to be less willing to pay their dues by working past normal business hours. And few people in print journalism suffer from more disruptive work schedules than copy editors, whose shifts typically last until midnight or later.

The difficult hours are just one factor in what experts say is a continuing epidemic of low morale on copy desks. "Every editor knows there is a problem on the copy desk, that there's a problem they need to deal with," says Gene Foreman, professor of communications at Penn State University and former managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. A study in the late 1990s found that copy editors were the least content employees in American newspaper newsrooms.

"Many people lack a real understanding of what copy editors do and don't seem hugely interested in finding out," says Vince Rinehart, national copy desk chief of The Washington Post. "There's not enough communication encouraged between copy editors and the rest of the newsroom. I can't speak for everybody's newspapers, but this is a general sense that I get from talking to copy editors."

McIntyre detects a superiority complex among some reporters "who feel that it is beneath their dignity to become acquainted with the realities of production." Reporters don't run newsrooms, of course. But as McIntyre points out, "many newspapers are run by people who used to be reporters."

There are signs of change. McIntyre's job, assistant managing editor for the copy desk of The Sun in Baltimore, didn't even exist three years ago. His newspaper and others, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times, are realizing the importance of devoting supervisory positions to the copy desk, he says.

McIntyre suggests that reporters spend time working on copy desks so they can better understand how newspapers are produced. Among other things, "they'll see they need to be more precise about their own work."

And the reporters may learn the lesson picked up by a local college student who worked briefly as a copy editor. "He said it just doesn't seem fair that you edit something, you catch 19 errors, and the 20th goes through and you get blamed for that," McIntyre recalls. "It isn't fair, but that's exactly what it's like to be a copy editor."

On the other hand, the role of gatekeeper is one of the glories of copy editing, says Holden. "I'd much rather be the arrow then the target. Let me find what's wrong with what other people are doing, instead of vice versa."