CHAPTER XII
COPY READING
If that change occurs (a return to smaller newspapers) there will be an increased demand for the services of the man who possesses not the common ability to make a story long and diffuse, but the rare talent of making it short, vivid and complete. There is hardly a newspaper office in the country in which the difficult and admirable art of compression has not been to a greater or less extent neglected in recent years.—From a lecture by Hart Lyman, editor of the New York Tribune.
The copy readers on a metropolitan newspaper do the work that is commonly associated with the word editor: they “blue-pencil,” or edit, the news copy. Tradition has equipped the editor with a blue pencil and has made it a symbol of editorial callousness. In reality, the copy reader is much more likely to use a soft black pencil with which a word may be cut out at a single stroke or an illuminating word inserted in broad, unmistakable characters. The copy reader takes the story as it comes from the reporter and puts it through a refining process. His work is critical rather than creative. It is destructive so far as errors of grammar, violations of news style and libel are concerned. But if his sense of news is keen, as that of every copy reader should be, he will find abundant opportunity for something more than mechanical deletion and interlineation. He may insert a terse bit of explanation to clear away obscurity or may add a piquant touch that will redeem a story from dullness. To the degree that he edits news with sympathy and understanding, with a clear perception of news values, his work may be regarded as creative. If, on the other hand, he conceives it his duty to reduce all writing to a dead level of mediocrity, if his ideal of editing is merely to wage war on the split infinitive and substitute “obtain” for “secure,” no matter what the sense, he richly deserves the epithet that is certain to be hurled at the copy reader by the reporter whose fine phrases have been cut out—he is in truth a “butcher” of copy.
QUALIFICATIONS FOR THE WORK
The efficient copy reader has a good working knowledge of the English language; he has a highly developed sense of news; he knows the style of his paper; he is content with nothing short of accuracy. To write headlines, he must have primarily the knack of putting the gist of a story into a few short, simple words. With all these qualifications he may yet fail if he is not able, when occasion demands, to work swiftly. It follows that he should keep in touch with current affairs and should lose no opportunity to add to his stock of knowledge of the city in which he works. The name of the Secretary of the Interior, the latest development in a famous will case, whether a thoroughfare is a street or an avenue, the initials of the county recorder—all such details can be found in the files of the newspaper or in reference books, but the copy reader can save valuable time if he has them filed away in his memory. New words are constantly coming into general use and new ideas are demanding expression. The copy reader must keep abreast of the big movements in science, in politics, in all the fields from which news stories are drawn. The right attitude toward his work was shown by a copy reader who, when ballooning first gave evidence of becoming a popular sport, went to the public library and looked in the index for “aëronautics.” He got the best book he could find on the subject and studied it. He learned the principles of ballooning and its special vocabulary and when stories of the new sport began to come to him, he was able to “blue-pencil” the copy intelligently.
ORGANIZATION OF COPY READERS
The number of copy readers depends, of course, upon the size of the newspaper. Small-city papers may have no men employed solely for this work. On the larger papers the staff of copy readers averages perhaps six or seven, while some offices use as many as a dozen or more. These men are said to comprise the “copy desk,” and all news copy, in theory at least, passes through their hands. On some papers the staff is divided, part reading telegraph copy under the telegraph editor and part working in the local room under the city editor. Other offices have adopted the newer plan of the combined desk, where both telegraph and local copy is read. This desk is in charge of a head copy reader, who apportions the copy among the readers, passes on their work after it is finished, and in general keeps things moving. The head copy reader is in effect a news editor or an assistant news editor. It is his duty to see that neither the local nor the telegraph department “plays up” its stories unduly, but that each story, whatever its source, is rated at its true value in relation to the other news of the day.
EDITING THE STORY
The work of the copy reader is twofold: (1) to edit the copy and (2) to write the head. Only the first of these functions will be discussed in this chapter.