Will Weblogs Make Copy Editors Obsolete?
Tom Mangans key quote: Corporate execs would love to be told, “look at blogs, they’re all unedited and people love them. Think how much more money we’d make if we weren’t paying all these editors.”
Tom Mangan is a features desk copy editor at the San Jose Mercury News and is well known in journalism blogging circles for Prints the Chaff, his weblog for newspaper editors.
In March he will be presenting a panel at the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) conference entitled The Future Doesnt Need Us: Weblogs and the End of Editing as Weve Known It
Its an intriguing title. Lets find out what it means in this Leonard Witt Instant Messenger Interview.
Leonard Witt: Hi, Tom. First I want to tell you I love your weblog Prints the Chaff. But lets get into it. What do you mean when you say: The Future Doesnt Need Us: Weblogs and the End of Editing as Weve Known It?
Tom Mangan: It’s basically a response to the many webloggers’ assertion that editing is unnecessary. I’m hoping to prove them wrong.
Witt: But I thought you said the future doesn’t need you.
Mangan: That’s another part of my presentation: that blogs happen every time major news happens. That tells me blogs will be coming to the newsrooms of tomorrow, and if we adopt the blogosphere’s side of the argument, we’ll be talking ourselves out of our own jobs.
Witt: Let’s look at the blogospere’s side of the argument first. Why do they think editing is unnecessary?
Mangan: Because they can. They really have no choice in any case. But the main argument is that editing will ruin the spontaneous nature of of blogs. I think this spontanaeity is highly overrated.
Witt: Why do you think so?
Mangan: Because nobody ever gets it right on the first try. And in the news biz, they cannot get it right without help. Editors exist because reporters can’t do everything. Nothing about blogging changes this.
Witt: Okay, so what advice do you have for bloggers? And then for news organizations and especially copy editors.
Mangan: Bloggers need to understand that their typos, their misspellings, their errors in fact and judgment cost them in the eyes of readers, and if they insist on going it alone they have to be comfortable with a small audience of people who don’t hold their errors against them. For news orgs, though, we have to insist that ours is a collaborative business and that the extra few minutes we take to bring multiple perspectives on stories is time well spent. Our readers will forgive us for being five minutes late, but right, far sooner than they will forgive us for being first, but wrong.
Witt: Daily Kos says it has more than a million unique viewers a month. It’s fast. Drudge never has been accused of accuracy. But he has an audience. Maybe it’s just you copy editors who worry about misspellings and such.
Mangan: Kos is a great blogger, but nobody mistakes him for the New York Times. He has no financial interest so he can quit anytime he wants. This means he’s freed of the institutional burden most professional journalists carry. It’s true that copy editors are too anal most of the time, but it’s also true that we keep fact errors out of the paper that would be published if not for us. Something else to keep in mind, particularly for copy editors: when information finds its way into online databases, it stays there forever. So, there’s much more at stake in avoiding errors when you take into account that everything we do becomes instantly searchable worldwide. If anything, this argues that there will be a need for more copy editors in the future. This is part of what I meant by “editing as we’ve known it.” A new kind of editing will be necessary online, one that’s more about getting the facts right and perhaps less persnickety about the style/usage things we preoccupy ourselves with.
Witt: So you are only talking about weblogs that are associated with journalistic enterprises.
Mangan: For the purposes of my presentation, yeah. Blogging is a natural way to report the news, I say that because every time big stories break, blogs pop up out of nowhere. We’ve been slow to realize this, but eventually almost all news will be posted blog-style. As a practical matter, most bloggers who do it as a hobby cannot afford to hire editors, and they don’t have any friends who will do it for them. So, hobby blogs will always be unedited, except to the extent that readers can comment and correct errors.
Witt: You say: eventually almost all news will be posted blog-style. Tell me more.
Mangan: It just stands to reason: when the big fires hit San Diego last year, bloggers started posting news updates, comments, personal perspectives, links to other stories. It’s an organic reaction to breaking news. It’s an indictment of our industry that we’ve been so slow to catch on to something so painfully obvious. Painful because amateurs are in some cases doing a better job than we are. This is the blogosphere’s case: we can do this without all you news people. They can, but they will never have the resources, time or professional commitment to stick it out over the long haul. We have the commitment, the resources, the money, all we lack is the realization that this is how news should be reported online. All we need to do is insert some editorial discretion into the equation.
Witt: Exactly, it is an organic reaction, but it is outside the newsroom. It’s cheap, fast and, like the fires themselves, out of control. That’s the beauty of blogs. How can you harness that?
Mangan: Tell you what happens when a big story breaks: people go to their local newspaper site first, find nothing, do a Google search, find nothing, then start a blog of their own because nothing’s out there. If we have a blog up and running within minutes of a big story breaking, we cut Google and the bloggers out of the equation. If we make it interactive, we make our site the go-to location for breaking news. We will open ourselves up to the problem of people entering comments that later prove untrue, but readers will learn to distinguish between the feedback — half of which is nonsense — and the work of the pros, which, hopefully, will have a much smaller nonsense factor.
Witt: Basically, you are still talking about the old top down kind of journalism. Where does bottom up fit into your equation?
Mangan: Most people will not have the time, inclination or commitment to do our jobs for us, particularly when they’re not getting paid. It won’t be top-down if we train ourselves to listen to our readers when they talk back. That’s another part of “editing as we’ve known it” that has to change. Right now we tune them out, throwing out the wheat with the chaff, if you’ll excuse the expression. The great thing about blogs is that inevitably the comments are as much fun as the posts they comment upon. Readers want there to be a top — that is, some kind of institutional authority that is trustworthy. What the bloggers are exposing is the fact that despite all our training and professionalism, a lot of the time amateurs can best us at our own game. If we learn to listen and welcome reader feedback, though, they will develop a commitment to us and learn to trust us as we’ve trusted them. It’ll take time and patience on both sides, but in the end news may be much better off for the change.
Witt: Do non-professional bloggers find that kind of talk paternalistic?
Mangan: I’m sure they do, but, if they were in my shoes, they’d say the same thing. I’ve been a blogger since before the term existed … I’ve got nothing against bloggers and I’m foursquare behind them in their insistence that the news biz needs to wake up and pay attention to what’s going on out there.
Witt: How do you anticipate the copy editors at your conference will react to your statements? Then if you gave the same presentation to bloggers, how would they react?
Mangan: It’s hard to say how they’ll react because I don’t know who’ll be there. If it’s all regular fans of my blog, they’ll be bored because I’ll talk a lot about the history of blogging, most of which they already know. If they aren’t regular fans they’ll probably wonder what all the fuss is about and wish they’d picked a different session. I don’t really know. One of the main points of my presentation is that bloggers are telling us stuff that will make our news presentation better — provided we learn how to listen. I didn’t do my presentation with bloggers in mind, to tell the truth, because this organization has never covered the topic before. I think, though, that bloggers would see somebody up there telling their side of the story and why copy editors need to listen up.
Witt: This is the last question. Lets put a different twist on the paternalistic theme. Have you shared your ideas with management? Do they listen or do they treat you as just another copy editor?
Mangan: Prints the Chaff is something I do in my spare time. My regular job keeps me busy enough that I don’t really have a lot of time to devote to telling my bosses what they should be thinking about what the paper does online. If they want my advice, they know where I sit. One last thing that we didn’t cover: Another reason why blogging seems like a threat to how we’ve always done things is that in some cases the blogging model is already happening in newsrooms: some editing is happening, but assigning editors are posting copy online and bypassing the copy desk completely. And corporate execs would love to be told, “look at blogs, they’re all unedited and people love them. Think how much more money we’d make if we weren’t paying all these editors.” We have to be zealous in insisting we are the guardians of the newspaper’s credibility, which is a kind of capital equipment we can’t afford to squander. If we tell ourselves that blogs and other online chores are somebody else’s job, that’s what they’ll become, but if all the news is online in the future, we won’t be part of it.
Witt: Spoken like a real copy editor. Thanks for a great interview.
Mangan: Twas a pleasure, thanks.
To read more Leonard Witt IM Interviews click here.
January 31st, 2006 at 12:06 pm
I agree with what most everyone is saying. That is, I think blogs are an interesting addition to journalism, but I do not think they will or should replace “true” journalism in print, broadcast, or online. It is interesting that it takes a possible threat to their jobs for editors to perk up and pay attention to new ways of delivering news and listening to readers’ requests, but that is understandable. As far as blogging being better for not having editing, I do not agree with that. I think that editing is very important because it organizes and clarifies when the reporter fails to do so. Although I often want to set my Stylebook on fire, at least it provides a consistent set of rules that basically upholds the modern English language, as cliche as that sounds.