There is some kind of archetypal story at every newspaper I’ve ever worked at that goes something like this: Writer thinks s/he’s a star and can do no wrong, threatens copy editor with DEATH if ONE WORD IS CHANGED.
So copy editor lets egregious error go right by without correction.
In my case the guy had to write a whole column of corrections the next week. He headlined it “Mia Culpa.” I didn’t change that, either.
Those prima donna writers just want to be Giles Corman when they grow up.
Although in terms of maturity, it is pretty clear that Mr. Corman hasn’t. Grown up, that is.
New York Smurf Exchange.
Change it back!
You had me laughing so hard. I can’t believe the sense of entitlement that comes with so many people of my generation. (Well, the younger end of Gen Y.) Some of the things they do just make me go :eek:
As a sometime professional copyeditor AND factchecker, boy howdy, that part of the job sucks. The only time it wasn’t a problem was when I was not working freelance, but was a house editor for a large management consulting firm. Part of my job was to edit all outgoing documents, from single-page letters to 300pp report binders. These were all written by cutthroat MBAs making ten times my salary. A lot of them took my changes very, very personally. The fun part though was that my boss was a capital-M Manager, and outranked 99% of the MBAs. All I had to do was send any unhappy MBAs to her, and she’d smack em around a bit. No one ever complained twice.
Don’t suppose you’re having problems with your illustrators or graphic designers too…
This. Seriously. My experience with people with degrees in journalism working as corporate writers was that many of them couldn’t even match subject with verb and didn’t know the difference between the Moon and a moon. Some of my classmates have BAs in Translation and Interpretation from English to their mother tongue but can not understand spoken English. People believe that anybody born in the USA has English as his “mother tongue:” the US Census begs to differ.
It’s the problem with believing that papers are a proof of competence. They should be but they aren’t. And, since we as a society believe that they are, and since evaluating the possession of a paper is easier than evaluating actual competence, we keep having this problem. It’s not getting better, as there are more and more-specialized-sounding degrees being born and often the training is just horrifically inadequate (one of my classmates got her Bachelor’s last year from a university where the whole Subtitling course was theoretical - to the point of not being able to watch videos in class).
The root problem is in the education process–my department includes a journalism minor in which I used to teach (haven’t in ten years maybe), whose students deserve to fail the course, oh, maybe 20-30% of the time. They don’t take writing seriously, show no interest in acquiring skills, etc., and badly need a wakeup call. But if you try to fail even 10% of them (and I did), you get outcries of “Meanie! Perfectionist! What does he expect of us?” etc. and, since the unverisity has been on a desperate retention kick for the bulk of my career (“Please! There’s got to be a way to make your point short of failing these kids, who will then drop out of school and reduce our revenue stream”) I felt pressure to pass students who refused to learn the rudiments of writing, research and hard work. It became a problem even to give Bs and Cs to students who felt entitled to As by dint of their ability to breathe. By the time I’d stopped teaching, I was telling students, “You know what? I’m going to give you all As, and stop the complaining, but don’t ask me for a letter of recommendation to a job unless you’re good, and now you’ll have no way to know who I think is good, because I’m not going to tell you whom I’m writing out letters for that are brutally honest.” But in the end, I found other work to do. It’s depressing.
We had a feedback session with someone from University Services last Friday. Translation is part of the School of Management and Languages, there were people from all seven Postgraduate Courses there. One of the things all of us students agreed on is that “if someone isn’t up to par, they shouldn’t get the degree, as it devalues the degree for the rest of us - and if they aren’t up to par for entering, they shouldn’t be admitted! The university is happy to take their money without giving them anything in return.”
It sucks 
Writing is one of the areas where a degree doesn’t automatically show competence (as I saw when I was in my Master’s Program). Any writer who doesn’t welcome a correction of facts* doesn’t belong in the field, though the editor should always explain the reason for the change.
*This does not apply to corrections where the editor doesn’t understand the subject, however. But the correct response to a mistaken correction is to lay the facts out to the editor (“I was referring to an organization that trades little blue people, not stocks.”)
Sorry you’re so unhappy, Cellphone. Definitely a good idea to get this VP’s new policy in writing as a CYA measure, and brush up the resume to see what else is out there… it’s though times in the Canadian publishing industry, but apparently things are starting to pick up again.
Going off on a tangent, this kind of stupidity totally explains the little speech I got from an editor I work with. I was really confused about the fact that she felt the need to warn me that she isn’t my mother, she’s not obliged to think everything I do is awesome and while she’ll do her best to be professional when providing feedback, she is in no way responsible for sugar-coating it lest my tender feelings be hurt.
:rolleyes:
I told her I did four years with a college newspaper. Working under an editor-in-chief that could be best described as a drunken megalomaniac pretty much burned out any tender feelings I might have had.
Because if they’re not padded, the person wielding them will sustain injuries from the shockwaves travelling up the club, into the arms / elbows of said clubber, resulting in injury, workmen’s comp, permanent disability.
I know, it means the clubs aren’t as effective, but there are always tradeoffs. Sigh…
I realize this isn’t an Ask the Fact Checker thread, but I’m gonna anyways. 
How exactlty does that work? How deep do you go? And what are your sources?
I understand the obvious ones like New York Smurf Exchange. But what about the technical minutiae?
For instance someone is quoting statistics in their story and that that a stock increased 23% instead of 32%?
Or that the NYSE started in 1729?
Well, obviously it was her (Mia’s) fault – Woody Allen distracted her! 
Did you ever see the movie Bright Lights, Big City?
It’s like that, without the cocaine.
Ahhhh, back form a short holiday for stress leave! Is it a bad sign that I was getting angry about work two days before coming home?
Luckily, the tracked soft copy goes from the proofreader to me before the changes get approved or rejected by the writers. So when (not “if” definitely “when”) a major mistake goes to print, I’ll have plenty of CYA documentation.
I’m not totally sure how deep our copy editor goes in his fact checking. We’re not a news outlet, so the demands aren’t as rigorous as you’d find in something like the New York times, but we do have a professional readership and the articles are specifically about their industry so mistakes will be noticed. Generally, if it’s written in the article, he’ll look it up to make sure that reasonable sources corroborate. We don’t have any “breaking news” type stuff, so it’s usually stuff you can look up through relevant agencies. Any really detailed or technical minutiae would probably be provided by and/or embedded in a quote by an expert, so it’s only in rare cases that there is something he can’t verify, in which case he makes a note about it (sometimes that’s a sign that the expert was misquoted).
Most of his fact checking is about verifying factual tidbits. For example, if there’s something about a specific tax accounting law, he looks up the law to verify that we are referring to the law correctly. So “Anti-Fraud Law #123 that went into effect in 2009”, will appear as it should, and doesn’t appear in our article as the “up-and-coming Anti-Smurf Law #321”.
Our fact checker doesn’t re-research the whole thing from scratch. So if the article is an interpretation of that anti-fraud law and the writer totally misinterpreted it, that’s not something our copy editor is expected to catch - that job belongs to the writer’s boss, the VP, who assigns the job. He’s supposed to check the content in that erspect.
I’m confused : are the writers paying the company to publish their stuff? Because if so, then I can see them demanding complete editorial control. But if it’s the other way round, then the company gets the final say.
But it sounds like this is a stupid decision by the VP regarding intra-company processes. Again, keep CYA copies of everything, so you can show it wasn’t your fault when the VP’s boss asks about an obvious mistake that made it in print.
The writers are paid by the company to research and write stuff. They do not have complete editorial control… or at least they didn’t used to, until they started complaining that corrections hurt their feelings.
When I helped run a tutoring service, our joke was that the English major college students were the worst to tutor the SAT Verbal, or God help us, the Writing test. Apparently they had spent most of their time articulating why Lennie had to be shot, and had not learned grammatical writing or even common phrasing. I sympathize with those of you dealing with journalism grads who probably have spent so much of their time discussing how they’ll never give The Man their source’s name that they can’t actually write.
What I don’t understand is the attitude of the manager who would let horrible writing or facts get into his publication. It directly reflects on him. Recently there was a link on Fark.com to an AP story that told about how the bunch of “unproven” kids on the USA Olympic hockey team had just beaten Canada. Of course, they were unproven except that every single one of them star in the NHL: http://www.usahockey.com/Template_Usahockey.aspx?NAV=TU_01_01_05&id=277216
I think it reflects very poorly on the AP writer, his editor, and the paper that reprinted it without putting a moment’s thought into it. For crying out loud, the Olympics has been using professional athletes for 18 years, didn’t it cross anyone’s mind that this might not be true? Furthermore, how is Canada allowed to use proven world class stars when America can’t?
Humph. I was an English major, and straight out of school I was hired as an assistant editor at a very small publisher’s. It was possibly the worst job I ever had. The Editor in Chief didn’t care about the product because the president of the company undermined him at every level. Fed up, he threw me a project that I was tickled pink to tuck under my wing. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I can write, and I can edit, and I can construct clear sentences, and even though I really enjoy commas I can rein this compulsion in when necessary. The book I was given didn’t benefit from any of these virtues. It was poorly laid out, poorly written, and unclear to the point of headaches (it was a freshman textbook and I felt very sorry for them). I managed to come up with a few changes in structure which helped immensely, and I started to go through line by line to help clarify the text.
The first draft of the first chapter made the author furious. He returned it with every one of my edits crossed out in red and he called the president and bitched him about about how I (a barely literate moron) had the temerity to DARE try and change a single word of his golden work. See, he was a professor of [some technical subject] and I had just graduated with an English degree and I knew NOTHING about ANYTHING and how could I have been in charge of this book…and more frothy ravings.
The president called me in, took me off the project, and published the book unedited without a peep from the Editor in Chief, who I believe sat in his office the entire time playing solitaire.
Later after I was fired (for saying perhaps we should care about our books and perhaps edit them occasionally) I looked up some reviews of these books. Almost all the reviews pointed out how criminally poor the editing was – something I’ve never seen in a book review before.