Editing key to papers’ online survival

SUB-EDITORS edit the news; they are not themselves the news. At least until recent days.

Fairfax Media has proposed the out-sourcing of part of the sub-editing of the news, business and sports pages of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald and some industrial conflict has ensued.

What does it mean? What do sub-editors do? The media is often not very good at analysing and explaining itself.

Essentially, the job of a sub-editor is to select articles and put them into a publishable state. Each article is checked for: expression, newsworthiness, and legality. I’ll expand on them in a moment.

The articles are then fitted on to pages with headlines, pictures and captions. The result is supposed to be a coherent snapshot of the main events of the day with each individual article telling its story without any glitches.

So reporters, columnists and other writers write the news, features and commentary and sub-editors package them into a day’s newspaper.

Fairfax papers and News Ltd papers in recent years have contracted out quite a lot of the sub-editing of articles and their laying out into pages. So far it has been limited to things like television guides, racing guides, finance tables, motoring pages and travel.

The urge to outsource or streamline sub-editing is understandable, but there are pitfalls.

Sub-editing is costly. As Editor of this esteemed and reviled journal (in the years before the internet) I bemoaned the large chunk of the wages budget which went to sub-editing – more than 40 per cent.

How is it, I thought, that reporters could go into the highways and byways, photographers capture the real world and commentators research and craft – in short do the core business – yet such a large cost of the enterprise was the cost of just piecing it together on a desk?

It seemed disproportionate. Surely, there was a more efficient way.

Enter Pagemasters. They were formed in 1991. They picked up work doing the tedious pages – TV and race guides. Then they kept expanding the number of titles they served, types of pages they did and their international reach.

Pagemasters says, “We take the grunt work out of production cycles, enabling publishers and editors to get on with the business of managing editions, making content decisions and driving readership and revenue.”

That is certainly true of TV and race guides and share tables. It is hardly journalism. And why pay someone a professional salary for something that could be done for much less?

Then what about other areas? Some of these pages are fairly formulaic – putting non-contentious material into pages: motoring, travel and fashion. Very little judgment goes in to selection and placing.

But let’s go back to what sub-editors do. First they select: what goes in, what gets left out. Then they place: which stories go where, how big the headline should be one each and how much story should run. Those decisions test “newsworthiness”.

They also result in an overall look (especially on Page 1) that reflects the news — large splashes for dead popes, invasions, big terrorist attacks, royal weddings and so on and run-of-the-mill pages when the main news story is of less moment.

And no matter what the news, the typography has to retain a consistency that identifies the publication instanteously.

Then comes the copy-editing part. First is checking that the intro is backed by the story and is the main point of the story, in effect checking the newsworthiness decisions made earlier. In that first read through the sub-editor also checks for logicality and cohesiveness; taste (it is going into a family newspaper); legality – defamation, contempt of parliament and court, national security even copyright.

In the detailed editing the sub-editor fixes poor expression; bad grammar, punctuation and word use (like refute when you mean rebut); misspelling (and spellcheckers do not pick up misspelled homophones like “complement” and “compliment” or “hear” and “here’); and tightens inefficient expression, weeding out clichés – devout Catholic makes mercy dash after brutal murder.

The sub-editor should fix all patent errors – those obvious on the face of the text, like spelling someone’s name two different ways or having the parts add up to more than 100 per cent. Also latent errors that are within the ambit of a knowledgeable journalist on that publication – misspelling a Canberra’ suburb’s name on The Canberra Times, or the wrong portfolio for a Federal Minister on any Australian paper.

Of least import is to apply the publication’s “style” – its option when there are two or more correct ones. For example, consistency of transliterations from the Arabic; capitalisation of positions; spelling out or using percentage or other symbols and so on.

The sub-editor then writes an active, accurate headline to fit and the captions for any pictures.

Despite this bold effort to put the material into a publishable state, errors still appear. Some are latent errors (of fact or misquote) made by writers which no sub-editor could be expected to pick up. Others should be picked up, and others still are created by sub-editors in their re-writing efforts to make the communication by the writer more efficient: same information in fewer words.

The internet has influenced thinking about sub-editing. A newspaper is a 24-hour snapshot. The net is continuous. The newspaper’s lead story is the main story of the day; the website’s top story is the most recent. On the web, a crash on the parkway now is more important than the federal budget three hours ago.

The website’s typography remains virtually identical whether the Pope is shot or a minor bureaucratic wrangle is the main story on the homepage. Nothing has to be cut to fit on the web, though stories should be cut for waffle.

Also consistent style loses importance when Google hits bring up stories from many publications, some with “color” others with “colour”, some with “Moslems” others with “Muslims”.

So if stuff can bundled into a website template, why not the same for the newspaper. Up to a point. Skilled sub-editors (whether employed at base or outsourced) add a lot to news publications. They are the equivalent of academic peer-reviewing. They put a stamp of quality on material that says: “This material has passed muster and has the stamp of the masthead on it. You can rely on it.”

It is different from all the un-edited, unreviewed, blogging and “journalism” on the web.

On my understanding, Fairfax does not intend to outsource the total sub-editing function in news, business and sport (particularly selection and other key quality-control elements), rather just the “grunt” tasks.

But in doing this, publishers will have to be alert to an emerging market. The daily newspaper when presented online in exactly the same form and pagination as the paper version is a valuable commodity. Consumers in a geographic area will pay for journalists (mostly sub-editors) to select and present a daily slice of the town, the nation and the world for a member of the community to remain reasonably well informed.

They do not want to be incessantly bombarded or have to flick constantly into news sites. They would prefer to set aside 20 minutes or more in a day in one or two bites to absorb the day’s dose presented in some coherent order of importance and category – whether on paper or on screen. If you like, a daily edition.

For two centuries readers have happily outsourced and paid for that collection, selection and presentation function in a natural 24-hour cycle, and my guess is that they will continue to do so whether on paper or online for a long time to come – even if individual items pop up free on Google searches or a free incessantly updated news website under the newspaper’s banner is available free.

Outsourcing some of the “grunt” work should not make any difference, other than to free up resources for the gathering of the raw material.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 28 May 2011.