Inside Copy Editing

A lot of my co-workers here at The DM wrote about job stress, long nights and the feeling that nothing is ever good enough. I've seen my share of that, especially last year when I was campus news editor before the advent of assignment editors. But for my blog today, I want to talk about the often overlooked role of copy editors at The DM and papers everywhere.

In my time here at The DM, I remember many many inquiries as to who was responsible for the grammar, spelling, poor comma usage, misleading headlines and every other AP Style or English language sin under the sun. Essentially, the whole staff is responsible. The person who wrote the deplorable cutline, who originally misplaced the comma and who refused to buy a style book usually gets blamed, and we all move on (hopefully toward better grammar).

This is why The DM, and virtually every newspaper in existence, has some form of copy desk. People make mistakes. As The Daily Mississippian is a daily newspaper we don't always do the type of fact-checking weekly magazines or monthly magazines do, but several people give each article a good, critical read before we go to press. At some magazines, fact-checkers have been known to call back sources to check every little detail. We're proud to trust our reporters on the big picture and use the support of editors for the rest.

After a city editor (or section editor in our case) looks over a reporter's work, a designer puts it on the page, and we get to work our magic. We read each article, first making sure it is readable and belongs in the paper. Our second concern is to check that the language is used correctly, that names are spelled correctly and that nothing looks fishy. Usually, one copy editor will read an article on the computer, decide on an appropriate headline (if it's a news article), and print it to get a second proofread by another editor. Then, the "slot" for the particular section, skims everything, checks the headlines and cutlines and makes a few more changes to the copy. Finally, the section is off to the managing editor and editor in chief who read everything again before we send the paper to the press.

You might wonder, do we even catch anything? After all, the paper you get every day still has several errors. First off, you might want to check and see if your English rules stray from AP Style ones (abbreviating Mississippi as "Miss." instead of "MS" when it follows the name of a city, for example, or leaving off the last comma in a serial). But, we do, indeed, catch a lot of minor things, change a lot of ledes, worry about every word in a headline and, on occasion, nix articles altogether. Here are a few things we caught that were memorable this year:

Charles Dickenson (Dickens)
Roberto Gonzales (Alberto)
Lindsey Lohan (Lindsay)
Oozy (Uzi)
Repel (Rappel)
Kenya Washington (Kyna Washington, LSU volleyball player)
Stephen Cohbert (Colbert)
Brittany Spears (Britney)