News Editing...A Dying Profession?

News Editing seems like it would be one of the most important positions at a news publication, right? You always will need people to check the facts, the grammar and anything else a writer might have screwed up on. However, by looking at headlines and news stories at the start of every class in Journalism 420, I have learned that many mistakes still make it to print. So perhaps newspapers like the News Gazette have all ready made some cuts we'd never thought were so desperately required in order to survive the tough newspaper business.

Alan D. Mutter, a former City Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, has blogged about this problem on his blog "Can newspapers afford editors?” He brings up important question: "how many editors does it take to a put a story in a paper?” Every newsroom has differing opinions on what the correct answer may be, and it really is a question we must consider in the wake of newspaper layoffs.

Mutter includes in his blog a thought provoking quote from a senior editor working at an undisclosed metropolitan newspaper:

“How many people have to read a story before it goes in the paper?” asked a senior editor at a major metropolitan daily who is struggling to sustain the quality of his news report in an era of shrinking resources. “If we have to economize, the editing process is the place. Why do we have all these people processing stories after a reporter writes it? They are not producing anything that will get us traffic on the web.”

At first read, I very much agreed with this editor: if the newspaper industry needs to make layoffs, editing is the first place to look. Do we need a story to be looked at by eight different people before the story is published? And in a time where newspapers have to compete against the Internet (a place that steals their hard earned stories and posts them on their websites saying its publicity for the newspaper when its just giving the reader a place to read the story for free), drastic cuts sometimes need to be made.

Mutter displays both sides of the story in order to give his readers the ability to judge fairly whether or not more than one or two editors are really needed at a news publication. As I really thought about this question, I began to remember how many mistakes we have found in class in newspapers like the News Gazette and the Daily Illini. I wonder if these publications have employed less editors over the years and there in lies why so many mistakes have made it to the final copy.

Mutter points out that this would be an issue if more editors were let go:

" A compelling case can be made that newspapers would debase themselves journalistically, commercially and, perhaps, even fatally by abandoning the disciplined reporting and professional editing that makes their content uniquely valuable in an age of frequently impulsive, often repulsive and usually unverified Twittering."

After reading this quote, I was sold on the fact that a good amount of editors are needed if you desire to publish a factual and clean publication. But Mutter also points out that, though the New York Times had a VERY extensive editing process, Jayson Blair and Judith Miller still got away with their wrongdoings.

So how many editors ARE needed to help publish a story at a newspaper? The majority (54.39%) of Mutter’s readers believes that 2 editors are all that is needed. Four or more comes in place at 2nd, one at 3rd and zero at 4th. One must remember that a majority of his readers are in the newspaper business themselves so therefore may deem the importance of editors higher than the average American. As for me, I am on the fence. I do think we MUST keep as many reporters as possible, but even one badly written or a falsified news story can bring down the entire publication. What do you think?