Limits of toleration and a discussion of copy editors

As we say en Français: Plus ça change... 

Photos by Katy Buchanan

From page A-2 of Aug. 28, 1981 Boston Herald American, saved from my honeymoon. (Not saved for the news, but for the Red Sox score, since we went to Fenway. These photos show the reverse of the HA's front page mast with the Sox-A's score, which, to forestall any questions, I do not remember and I'm not turning over the page to find out. (So there 😀)  I just saved because I was young, in love and keeping every scrap of paper from our week in Boston and Cape Cod.

Looking at these also made me feel: a) Nostalgic for UPI (one of my former employers) and for the many U.S. daily, weekly and community newspapers that have gone to their graves since then, and 2) Grateful for the training I received from them as a young journalist.

As an aside, I believe journalism needs more well-read, intellectually adventurous copy editors. I know the trend is to centralized desks where the editors are far from the reporters and the stories they are filing, but that shouldn't preclude good editing (excepting, perhaps, in stories involving local geography). A copy editor's best friend, as far as I'm concerned, is the phone. Confused? Unsure? Call the reporter. I know reporters who have already gone a few rounds with their direct editors can get cranky when copy editors call, and I don't blame them, but the whole point is to be correct and factual. One of my worst memories from my copy editor days was the time an assistant city editor suggested I didn't have enough to do when I questioned an education writer's math in a story at the Pittsburgh Press. The reporter's math was wrong. And math is not my best subject. (And do not get me started on dangling modifiers.)

Getting back to the first sentence in the previous paragraph, please see this delightful piece from the New Yorker's 'Comma Queen.' Greek To Me

Wisdom

My friend Sharon and I went out for wine and appetizers after work today, talking, along the way to the bar, about family, work, life.

Sharon and I have known each other for more than 20 years. And have been working together for the same amount of time.

So we share a history, reference points that need no explaining. We each know what the other is talking about.

In that way we are like family, which is nothing more than groups of people who share a history, except it's on the basis of blood relation, not life circumstance.

It's interesting to think about that kind of relationship in the context of the where Sharon and I work. A newspaper called the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

A newspaper, more than most businesses, relies on the institutional wisdom, the family wisdom, if you will, that is shared among the reporters, editors and photographers who tell the stories for it each day.

As you tell stories about a place over the years, you acquire a knowledge of people. People who have influence, people who simply know things, people who are empathetic enough or opinionated enough that they can talk about many things.

This is good and it is bad. Good, because this knowledge gives your reporting breadth, bad, because after a time, you begin to rely on the same people. You end up with boilerplate.

No matter. If you live in a community and read a newspaper, in print or online, think about the work of the people whose names are attached to the stories, the photographs, the videos. They are repositories of received, conventional and family wisdom. And they have value because they are associated with a newspaper, something that has a cachet as a place for information.

A place where people call people. Ask questions. Call more people. Ask more questions. Sit. Think. Talk to others face to face. Condense information. Write. Re-write. Make more phone calls. Answer an editor's questions.

Then, and only then. Tell a story.

And then:

Think about it overnight. Come up with a follow up story idea asking all the questions you missed the first time.

If newspapers could download their reporters' and photographers' brains, that would be so much more valuable than keeping their contacts.

A contact to a new person is just a phone number or an e-mail address. Not a relationship.

And relationships are formed in families, of blood or circumstance, whose essential component is the rich medium of human contact.

Eyes, mouths, ears, noses, fingers, sharing contact, has got to be the finest technology of all. Because, pretty much, there's not much room for miscommunication.