In defense of editing

There was a point about seven or eight years ago when I realized that I would not end up working at a newspaper for my entire career. Within the past few years, I had a similar epiphany about being a journalist.

I've been a journalist, by anyone's definition, since January of 1993, when I started covering the men's basketball team for the student newspaper at Catholic University. I became the sports editor the next fall, then was No. 2 at the paper the next semester. Before graduation, I was hired as a part-time agate clerk for Baseball Weekly, and after a winter off, came back full time when the 1994 baseball work stoppage was settled.

I have always been an advocate for editing, even at a student newspaper, which was sometimes a tough sell. At Baseball Weekly I spent hours watching over Margaret McCahill's shoulder, learning even more about editing. I eventually became a copy editor, and grew to pick up a lot of other skills along the way, some related to journalism, others to project management, content strategy, social media and web analytics.

But even though journalism and editing are not as valued as they once were, I will always be an editor, deep down. And what has happened to editing over the past few years is troubling.

Proofreading is not a replacement for editing. And spell-check is not a replacement for proofreading.

Recently there was an insert into our church's weekly bulletin with a letter from the church school's principal. It contained an error, where a sentence read, "... with food, fellowship and games run by out 8th graders." I don't know how many eighth graders are out. Spell-check doesn't know the difference between out and our. We also received a newsletter from the Bloomington public schools with a typo in the very first sentence of the lead story, which was a letter from the superintendent of schools.

And these are our educators. It's difficult for me to accept this from people paid to educate our children, even though I know they are simple typos. It's the lack of attention and care paid to writing that's the issue. But it's not as bad as it could be. I see posts from some people who home-school their children which are also riddled with misspellings and I cringe.

There's a local online news outlet that consistently confuses its with it's. And said news outlet doesn't seem to read its Facebook feed's comments to see what people are saying about its coverage, which is a social media failure even if there weren't errors.

The irony hasn't escaped me that I am writing this defense of editing on a blog, which is one of the least-edited mediums there is. And I know that newspapers place less and less emphasis on editing with every round of layoffs. But editing is not a luxury. As Arthur Polotnik said, "You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke."

Everything can be edited: news copy, blog posts, emails, Facebook statuses, tweets, you name it. And if you're a company which interfaces with the public, you should hire me to do it.

What I miss about newspapers

It's coming up on two years since I last worked at a newspaper, and there are certain things I miss.

Copy editing for a newspaper is different than online. A newspaper is one-and-done -- if you miss something, it's often gone until tomorrow. Your story needs to fit a certain size and your headline has to as well. If the headline is more than one line, it's supposed to make sense where the lines break.

There's a certain gaming aspect in it for me. What's the fewest number of words you can take out of a story to make it fit? Once the widows are deleted, is anything else easy to remove?

(A widow is where, at the end of a paragraph, one word kicks over to the next
line.)

This past winter I was in New York for a pair of Division III games and sat next to the writer from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. He was filing on deadline for his Gannett paper, which used the same editing software we did when I was at USAT. So I was looking over his shoulder as we were trying to make his story fit the space while the copy desk back in the newsroom was writing the headline. Felt like I was back in a newsroom.

I even dreamt the other night that I was back at The Tower, which is the student newspaper at Catholic. I was a visitor, not a staffer, but just dying to edit something, anything, and I made my wishes known.

Even though online is on a perennial deadline, and there's a definite rush from that, it's just not the same feeling.

Why it's on TV

I'm sitting here watching Davidson/Kansas (Davidson 51-47 with 7:35 left, for those scoring at home) and Elizabeth looks up at the television.

Remember, Elizabeth came with me to the regionals at Gettysburg earlier this month and got a real up-close look at what Division III is like as well as what I do to run D3hoops.com.

Elizabeth: "What's that? It's basketball, but what division?"
Me: "It's Division I"
Elizabeth: "Oh. That explains why it's on TV."
(Smart girl! And she just closed my parentheses for me. After a pause ...)
Elizabeth: "So what's Division II?"
Me: "Good question"

Then I explained to her that Division II has some scholarships, etc., etc., and she said, "Oh. So it's second-best."

I didn't ask her which was best. Hopefully she knows. :)