Newsroom cuts in San Diego

The creation of the "Jr. Staff Writer" at the San Diego Union-Tribune isn't as funny as it first appeared. Apparently the lower paying position coincides with yet another round of newsroom layoffs. Between 34 and 40 reporters, web editors and copy editors could lose their jobs, according to NBC San Diego.

Four in the morning

1. Tribune Co., the owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, still ekes out a profit, although the margin has shrunk significantly since the company filed for bankruptcy in December. Chicago Business via LA Observed

2. Cowboys and tyrants. George W. Bush wants to display Saddam Hussein's pistol at his presidential library: "He wants people generations from now to see the gun and say, ‘He got the bad guy.’" . NYT

3. In praise of the copy editors and the proper punctuation they leave behind: "They're skeptics who revel in the arcane. They know the difference between median and mean, and can speak knowledgeably about topics from Methuselah to the Milky Way. They write headlines, design some pages, check facts and make sure assertions are supported. They spend entire careers working horrible night-shift hours." WaPo

4. Growing up in the "incarceration generation." - "Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents." NYT

Editing the new front page

Almost every newspaper site has "most viewed" widget on its front page. The list is mostly a passive tool - reporters and editors can throw a few search engine-friendly words into a headline or lede to try to generate buzz, but I doubt this is very common on the news side. Instead, readers largely drive the list and, once a story makes the ranks, its popularity becomes almost self-fulfilling: readers see Story A is the eighth most viewed, so they get curious and click on it, and suddenly it's the fifth most viewed. And up the chain it goes.

Which makes me think that newsrooms need a more robust plan to drive the stories out onto the Internet that they deem most newsworthy (not necessarily most click-worthy), using the same care and judgment they apply to building the front page of the printed edition.

Editors need to take the lead (and some surely are). They need to be the ones using the Twitters and Facebooks and blogs to push the front page out. Don't leave it to reporters to promote their own work (which is generally a bad idea anyway) on personal Twitter accounts; don't wait for bloggers, aggregators or algorithms to find the stories; and don't let the popular become the enemy of the good.

Promote the paper's editorial judgment and, in doing so, promote the things that separate newspapers from other media: traditions of accuracy, institutional memory, standards, ethics, beats, etc.. Flaunt it. If you have an A1 blowout on a corruption scandal that's not riding the "most viewed" tide, then advocate for it on the social networks and blogs (and to producers like me) with the same intensity used to get it onto A1 in the first place.

Don't wait to find out what readers think is news. Show them. And, in doing so, build an active relationship with the audience, rebuild a sense of mission in the newsroom, and show readers why being a witness to events is different from reporting on them.

In the past, the printed front page stood as a newspaper's collective assertion of editorial judgment. Story placement, photos, headlines... these were the visual and written record of what the newspaper could do, and how well it did it. Now the front page has fragmented and spread. The rigid architecture is gone and an organic one has taken its place.

Reporters are now being asked to write more frequently, more briefly and on shorter deadlines. Copy editors are being asked to work faster and more efficiently to get copy online. Editors - their ranks thinned, their influence diluted, their resources strapped - have tried to keep the paper's bearings. Now editors must actively and collectively assert their judgment to create front pages that unfold onto a complex, multidimensional online environment.

Buy American (copy editors)

The three guilds representing editorial employees at many of Dean Singleton's California newspapers released a joint statement criticizing a comment Singleton made on Monday about the possibility of consolidating his copy desks and then shipping the work overseas.

Here is what Singleton said:

"One thing we're exploring is having one news desk for all of our newspapers in MediaNews ... maybe even offshore."

The guilds' response:

“We understand the need for newsrooms to operate more efficiently in tough economic times,” said Sara Steffens, chair of the BANG-EB bargaining unit. “But outsourcing copy-editors is a terrible idea. The move would damage beyond repair the things readers and advertisers value most about newspapers: Our wealth of local knowledge, and our commitment to accuracy and fact-checking.”

Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre had this to say:

Imagine as a comparable instance that General Motors and Ford, fighting desperately to reverse their plummeting sales and stock values, concluded that it would be smart to save money by eliminating the quality control function. Think they’d wind up selling more cars?

The inessentialness of copy editors

Everyone who knows anything about the Internet, or online journalism, or accounting, knows that copy editors are an expensive luxury. Old news in a new news world. Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post proves the point in his column this week:

The inessentialness of copy editors is underscored by the advent of sophisticated spellchecking systems which have introduced a hole new level of error-free proofreading. No longer can we say that the editor's penis mightier than the sword. The sword's main foe is a computer now, and the computer is up to to the task.

Outsourcing hyper-local

First, we learned some newspapers were planning to ship ad production overseas. Then, we learned MediaNews was outsourcing customer services for its Northern California papers to the Philippines. Now, the Orange County Register-owner Freedom Communications plans to send some its stories to India for copy editing.

Gives a whole new meaning to the concept of a foreign desk.

Oh, the horror

The San Gabriel Valley Tribune had a faulty headline in today's paper. Very faulty.

Here it is.

It's not as bad as the San Bernardino Sun running a caption that read "Horsing Around" under a photo of a riderless horse in a cop's funeral procession. But close.

This should remind us all of the value of a good copy editor.

Speaking of which, I hear the copy editors have returned to the Tribune after being exiled to San Bernardino as part of a nutty cost-savings scheme... None too soon, it seems. Let's hope the failed experiment makes its way to the ears of the Singleton big wigs.