At the front door, guards who knew my friend on a first-name basis greeted him cordially, took his security pass and presented him with a water-stained cardboard box filled with his belongings. Nobody was there to say thank you for his decade of commitment and loyalty; the guards had performed the same curt ceremony two dozen times already over the past six months.
The day after my friend's exit, a brace of attorneys visited his now-former employer. Not because he had hired legal eagles in response. Instead, these attorneys were sniffing for negligence and thought they might smell blood in the building. Because the night my friend was laid off, the employer made a critical error that went public.
My friend, you see, had been a newspaper copy editor. His job, simply stated, was to ensure other people looked good. He caught reporters' errors and corrected them before publication, and by extension made the newspaper look good. But before his last night at work the editing staff already suffered a shortage of bodies. News stories that should have been scrutinized closely were pushed through in a hurry to meet a deadline. So on the first night he was gone, some errors were missed, including a libelous one that wound up in print and online the next morning before an estimated 1 million sets of eyes. The attorneys showed up at the front desk before the security guard had finished his morning coffee.
Today, the newspaper still publishes and it has laid off more employees, perhaps to defray legal costs. My friend found a new job outside of journalism. He corrects errors now in the private sector. How much money was required to solve the newspaper's libel problem, I do not know; maybe enough to have kept my friend and a couple other copy editors on the payroll a year or more.
Now, sure, there's no telling that the newspaper would have avoided trouble for certain had my friend still been there. But fewer editors tends to mean more errors, and not just at newspapers. A recent New York Times article cited book publishers' propensity for cutting corners as the reason for the rise of spelling and other errors in books and manuscripts. These publishers used to have copy editing staffs, too. Another report, this one by the BBC, highlighted an entrepreneur's claim that spelling errors on merchants' websites in the United Kingdom have drastically curtailed online sales there.
And this all matters … how? Well, the point of editing, of perfecting one's communication, hews to professionalism. A lack of errors implies attention to detail that extends to other services and products. Sure, we all want to see our names and our kids' names published in the paper properly, if for no other reason than personal pride or bragging rights. At the same time, we want drug manufacturers and home builders and airplane mechanics to work with accurate printed information, because communication errors in those fields require much more than a printed correction.
The people who collect and disseminate information for print, online and broadcast have come under considerable pressure lately. Their numbers have dwindled, they're forced to do more with fewer resources and they must perform faster and longer in this burgeoning, 24-hour-deadline world. Volume matters and speed matters in that world, yet fewer watchdogs are standing by to account for accuracy and credibility. Meanwhile, media conglomerates continue to reap prodigious profits year after year, in large part through savings gained through editor layoffs.
I wonder then about the target-rich environment for litigators this shaving for savings' sake creates. You see, news copy editors not only push for proper spelling and grammar, they also are trained to recognize nuance, particularly where slander and libel are concerned. The case used to be at many news publications that copy editors were paid more than reporters because they were considered to be like the armor on a tank ‒ protection. It has been said that all copy editors make good reporters, but not all reporters make good copy editors.
This philosophy persisted in print journalism until the Internet brought publishing to everyone's desktop and made anyone with a half-formed thought, a keyboard and an Internet connection capable of sending “news” circling the globe in seconds. While all of us were agog over the potential, there rose the misconception that the “delete” key cured all ills.
But electronic words are like hard lead on cheap notebook paper; the erasure never comes off completely. Our Web marks, once made, leave an impression that delete keys cannot expunge, and that impression can last decades. And as the technology improves, so does the ease at plucking out these stray, unwanted marks after the fact, which then opens the question: Were these errors honest, or did they result from carelessness or negligence?
That distinction also is becoming easier to detect. Thus, the next question from an attorney might be: If copy editors were laid off for the sake of saving a few dollars, might that act alone constitute contributory negligence?
I imagine that one day soon there will be a brace of attorneys knocking on the door to test that possibility. Look at the empty copy editing desks around you and pray your publication can pass the test.
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