The Efficiency Of Editorial Pyramid

 

The emphasis in newspaper work has long – too long, perhaps – been put upon the reporter. While there is no wish to take from him credit for his many superb contributions to the excellence of the modern newspaper’s it ought to be realized that there is a man who stands between him and his critical public – the copy editor.

It is seldom that the wit, ingenuity and craftsmanship of the copy editor rescue the reporters. It is the editorial pencil as much as the reportorial typewriter that puts before the public daily the readable information of the world’s happenings. It is the copyeditor or the sub-editor (as he is popularly called) who is essentially that guardian of what gets into the newspaper and how it looks when it gets there. He detects the errors, corrects the English, cuts out the dead wood of verbiages, tones the story up to its roper pitch or down to the level required by good taste or the libel, laws.

The appeal of the reporter’s work is great; the activity, the contact with the world, with its great men and with its ideas, make the stimulation of the job unparalleled in any profession. But the copy editor is closer to the heart of newspaper’s power; he is indeed, its heart. Under his pencil flow the accounts of all-important happenings anywhere. This sense of closeness to vital things, plus the ability to shape information about them so that their importance will be shown in true perspective, makes the copydesk job second to none.

Whatever the respective merits of the copy editors and the reporter’s work, both are cogs in a machine that has only one object: to gather and publish quickly information of events. The newspaper strives to put before its readers daily the interesting and important happenings that have occurred or have become known in the preceding twenty - four hours. Information, to be news, must be new, fresh immediate, and it is the reporter’s task to gather and write it quickly and the copy editor’s to hasten it through the news machine into print. It must not be supposed that this speed is uncontrolled. It is that of efficient men trained to their work. The following subsections carry the different people behind the making of a newspaper.

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newspaper , editing

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