May 28, 2000

WASHINGTON -- An insight into the evolution of journalism came to me as I watched one of the many ESPN sports news shows: ESPN's newscasters, as do almost all television newscasters or "anchors," sit behind desks that are best described as "slots." From these slots, the newscasters deliver the day's news directly to the viewer.

"The slot" has a storied history in journalism. The name is given to the chief copy editor, who with a cadre of other copyeditors known as "the rim" read every word that goes into the newspaper before it goes to press. In the history of journalism, copyeditors have been known as "the final gatekeepers" in keeping misspellings, bad grammar, factual errors and libelous statements from getting into print.

Before the revolution of electronics hit the newsroom, the daily newspaper was edited by a bank of editors with blue pencils and paste pots, editors who were positioned around a central table in the main area of a newsroom. They were said to be sitting on "the rim." In the center of the table sat the chief copy editor, who doled out the day's stories -- both locally produced and from the wire services -- to the editors on the rim for fact-checking, grammar-checking, headline writing and some rewriting of the copy. The chief copy editor gained access to his or her chair in the center of the table -- usually slightly elevated -- by means of a narrow slot in one end of the table; thus, that editor became known as "the slot."

Few if any contemporary newspapers retain the physical structure of the slot and rim. Computers have altered that structure. The person called the slot is indistinguishable from other copy editors, all of whom sit in cubicles and edit stories and write headlines on screen. The slot may still assign stories to individual copyeditors, but many editing functions are handled by computer, more than likely by means of a special software program known as a "pagination system."

Pagination systems generally allow any editor in any position to view an entire page at one time and to position stories, headlines and photographs on that page. With the push of a button or the click of a mouse, the editor can switch into editing mode and work on the words of a story placed on the page.

In a sense, electronic pagination systems have made every editor both a copyeditor and a layout editor.

The subtle shift that has taken place in most of the nation's newsrooms puts one person in control of an entire page. Now, a single editor often lays out the stories, edits the stories, writes the headlines, places the photographs, writes the cutlines and captions, and in extreme deadline situations, may become the lone proofreader of the page before it goes to press.

In other words, electronic journalism has forced the roles of several editors into one, and while the computer has truly saved time by allowing editors to keep working almost up to the start of the presses, the same computer has compressed the workload and editorial functions to a degree that "the last gatekeeper" has almost disappeared. Layout and design have prevailed over the details of copyediting, and those previously called copyeditors now are more often than not working as paginators.

Television news has taken "the slot" and elevated it to a key position as "anchor." The anchor generally delivers the news directly to the viewer or interviews reporters in the field to get the latest updates on a story. Following suit, perhaps unwittingly, newspapers have frequently eliminated the slot and drastically diminished the linguistic skill demands on the copyeditor.

Newspapers have subtly been leaning toward the broadcast model, and the newsrooms of the nation are experiencing a gradual diminution of copyeditors. For the most part, their traditional role has been taken over by "paginators." Only in larger, major-market newspapers has the historical role of the copyeditor been preserved. Smaller newspapers, often out of economic necessity, have drastically altered the traditional job.

A look at any of the classified ads for newspaper copyeditors tells much of the story. Newspapers now seek copyeditors with skills in pagination systems such as QuarkXpress or any of the other competing software for editorial operations. Some of the ads even demand that a copyeditor demonstrate familiarity with Photoshop, the most ubiquitous software for dealing with photographs, a tool originally meant for graphic designers.

Often missing from the ads are indications that copyeditors are expected to be knowledgeable in grammar, diction or style (beyond the rules of the AP Stylebook). Only rarely are copyeditors tested on their ability to demonstrate the proper use of a hyphen in compound adjectives and compound nouns or to distinguish between the restrictive and non-restrictive uses of that and which. The proper use of a semicolon is rarely insisted upon; that punctuation mark is simply eliminated. Similarly, commas are inserted less by the conventions of sentence structure than by some subjective sense of breathing or sound. Knowledge of QuarkXpress apparently covers a multitude of grammatical weaknesses.

Frankly, however, it is not lack of skills that are making copyeditors disappear. More often than not the bottom-line mentality of the publisher and owner of the newspaper demands a reduction in staff, and when editors are forced to cut personnel, the copy desk typically suffers the first casualties. Even those copyeditors with exceptional linguistic skills find such tools being exercised less and less because of design demands and time pressures.

Much of the recent criticism of journalism's credibility might be traceable to its self-imposed restriction of the "gatekeeper" role traditionally exercised by copyeditors. Without good copyeditors, the gatekeeping function diminishes and errors of grammar, spelling and fact are more likely to get into print.

This same criticism has been leveled at online news operations, where stories and commentaries often go from the writer to the reader with minimal editing. But newspapers, in their attempt to compete with broadcasting and online delivery of the news, have paved the way in this diminishing of the copyeditor's function.

Historically, copyeditors have gained little celebrity. They are unknown and unacknowledged in the newspaper editing process. Reporters get bylines, executive editors and supervisors have their names placed in the publication's masthead, but copyeditors labor anonymously.

The Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph has been experimenting with giving individual copyeditors recognition. In addition to listing the reporter's byline, the Gazette Telegraph tells readers who edited the story and who wrote the headline.

So far, the initiative in Colorado Springs hasn't caught on with other newspapers.

A recent survey published in Editor & Publisher indicates that online news consumers are more interested in words than in images. This might be interpreted as meaning that grammar, diction and style are more important than graphics, and that the dictionary and almanac remain as tools equal to if not superior to programs such as QuarkXpress in the desk editor's toolbox.

If print journalism is to regain much of its credibility, perhaps copyeditors can regain some lost importance to the news. They may have to make themselves known in the online world. Newspapers, it appears, have been lured into competing with television where the image is everything and the slot delivers the news. Now that most newspapers are online, they may rediscover the importance of editors who are true wordsmiths and genuine gatekeepers.

Or so we can hope.