Technical writers often wind up being proofreaders. You’re hired to create documents, but often become the go-to word person and wind up proofing everything in the company (marketing materials, emails, newsletters, birthday cards, etc.).
If your friend has a background in a specific field, they could look into being a tech writer for that field (medical, insurance, software, hardware, finance, etc.).
To add a little to this, the job depends greatly on the size of the paper. Some papers, particularly smaller ones (though not exclusively), will roll all these jobs into one or two. I’d say most of the largest papers probably still have page designers and graphics folks to do those jobs, along with maybe a second line edit. Editing, copyediting, fact checking and digital conversion frequently get combined into one position.
As far as the career path, you could conceivably get hired on at a small city paper to do all of the above-listed jobs, then with experience move to a major metro paper’s copy desk where you could focus on the copyediting (while still doing some of the others, as needed).
More realistically, if I were in high school and interested in pursuing a career in (non-freelance) proofreading, I’d probably learn Web design and administration. Then I’d get on with an internet publisher like the Huffington Post, the Gawker network or a newspaper with a prominent online presence.
This kind of statement always confuses me. I’ve been in the news business since the late 1980s and I’ve never worked with any kind of an operation that has a “fact-checking department” or even a “fact checker.” It has always been the reporter/writer’s duty to get facts straight, not someone else’s responsibility.
Really? I have a lot of interactions with lawyers from large law firms and not one of them has ever mentioned having or using a proofreader. And when I was in practice, there was never any mention of proofreaders. Proofreading was the duty of the lawyer.
When Time magazine started, it quickly developed a new approach to articles. A reporter or a team of reporters or several reporters in several cities would send back raw information to the editors. The editors would then massage it all into a manuscript, written in the group style that became known as Time-speak without any trace of individuality, described by Wolcott Gibbs in like manner:
Reporters learned that they were to supply local color and quotes. “Researchers” back in New York - until the 1970s at both Time and Newsweek, all researchers were women since they couldn’t get a starting job as a reporter - filled in all the facts. So a reporter would use TK - news jargon for “to come” - liberally. “Saigon, a city along the TK river, houses TK people in a unique style of pointed pagodas called TK.”
The researchers would also check the accuracy of any facts that the reporter deigned to include.
This all paled before the king of all fact-checking magazines, The New Yorker, behind whose august and silent doors a martinet cracked whips over a bevy of - yes, female - worshippers at the alter of Harold Ross and wouldn’t approve an article for publication until every word - literally every word - had a pencil mark over it signifying that someone had used encyclopedias, the phones, or a personal visit to verify the information. John McPhee recently wrote of his experiences being factchecked.
It was a strange world that is now largely extinct.
In an ideal world the reporters will get their facts right, but if you’ve written for a newspaper of any size then I’m sure the subeditors will have double-checked names, ages, places and so on. If you’re writing copy to a tight deadline, do you really have time to check that such-and-such politician is Stephen, not Steven?
You’d be amazed at what writers get wrong. I used to sub the Travel section, and we’d have writers filing copy in which they misspelled the name of the hotel they stayed at. Sometimes they’d file copy that was little more than field notes, and I’d have to turn it into a readable story, while the writer got the byline (and the free trip, of course). But that’s the job.
I’ve been a freelance copyeditor and proofreader for 17+ years.
It’s not as simple as some people seem to think (I do more than just read and pick out typos), and yes, some jobs can be a drag (I’m looking at YOU, legal documents with hundreds of references in 8-point type), but some can be fun AND lucrative. I have a fairly new client who pays by the page, and the pages are not very dense, and I’m fast, so I make a tidy hourly rate on those projects.
Also, online/electronic documents need to be copyedited and proofread too. If I had a nickel for every time somebody said to me, “Can’t they just run spell-check?” . . . (Answer: no, they can’t.)
That’s a fascinating story, Exapno. Thanks.
And this kind of underlines the situation. “Fact-checking” as you describe it was apparently the province of a limited number of elite magazines. It was never a common practice in publishing or journalism. What’s strange is that people refer to it as if having fact-checkers was some kind of accepted standard.
This should be in a large bold font, or even better, stamped onto peoples’ eyeballs. Spellcheckers do a crucial but limited job. (How many times have you left out a letter and had it passed by the spellchecker because the new combination was a legitimate word?) Even the most minimally professional writing requires more.
Proofing is not copyediting which is not editing which is not rewriting. Every stage is critical. It’s rare to the vanishing point when any one person can do them all - as the plague of self-published items hitting the web amply demonstrates. Every professional at every level of the business quickly learns to doublecheck everything, time and expertise permitting. You don’t need a formal department for that.
Or, rather, it’s rare that any one person can do them all on a single document. Fresh eyes are needed.
That’s not true. The same tired old pair of eyes will spot an error instantly, as soon as it rolls off the presses. :rolleyes:
I am an editor. “Proofreading” refers, to me at least, to one level of editing that a given project requires. Usually, in the initial stages of producing a piece for print or online publication, the emphasis is heavier on the editing part. That is to say, editing means fact-checking, fixing grammar, usage, spelling, punctuation, adherence to the publisher’s accepted style resource. On subsequent reviews, the proofreading part comes into play where you are simply checking to ensure that all previous edits were applied properly and that no new errors have been introduced.
Very little, in my 20 years of publishing experience, is looked at by just one person a single time. Nearly everything is recursive and goes through several rounds and levels of review.
Most people who work in the business wear many hats during the production of a given piece. You might have input on the elements of the design. You might have to do some heavy re-writing of particularly bad copy. You might simply be making cosmetic corrections, or what we call “preferential” edits. These are corrections to things that aren’t necessarily wrong, but the correction will make the copy more clear and/or concise.
Not all proofreading gigs are with book publishers. There are editors and proofreaders at newspapers. Editors are more about the fact-checking and corroboration while proofreaders will simply make sure everything is correct.
I started with a BS in Journalism. There appears to be no need for an advanced degree in this field. Many editors and proofreaders I work with have English degrees, or general communication degrees. Some simply have work experience and fell backwards into the field.
There can be a progression. For example, I work for an enormous, international, test-publishing firm (offices all over the world). At my company, one starts out as a proofreader or assistant editor. You could be promoted to editor and then senior editor. After that, you could be promoted to managing editor, who is usually the supervisor over the pool of editors and proofreaders and is more like a traffic cop, making assignments and making sure everyone is staying on deadline and getting help for anyone who’s in the weeds. While my company does have a book publishing arm (several actually – some very well known paperback imprints), jobs in book publishing are really few and far between. However, most companies have some sort of marketing/pr/publishing department and that is where I’ve spent the bulk of my career. Sometimes, you’re writing, editing, proofing, and producing advertising and marketing materials. Sometimes, you’re writing, editing, proofing, and producing the company newsletter and other internal communications. My last job was supervising a team of editors and graphic designers who created the printed materials that were a companion to the products and services the company sold. (Company buys Widget; my department then provided the associated documentation that went along with that widget.)
Software companies hire technical writers to write (and edit and proof) software documentation. There’s always a market for production of training materials, often incorporating web-based applications and multiple media.
Newspapers are dying in general, as an industry, and most editors at a newspaper are former journalism majors who worked as reporters for years and then got promoted to the newsroom to sort of be the shepherd for all the reporters.
There are some freelance opportunities, but I’ve had a difficult time getting repeat customers. Typically, whenever I’ve been hired to “look at” something, I work through the copy, correct everything, maybe go through a proof it stage to make sure all my edits were made properly, and then I’ve edited/proofed myself out of a job. Once the copy is correct, a company that will hire a freelancer to edit a one-off project probably does not have enough work to keep feeding work to the editor/proofreader. I wouldn’t recommend freelance proofreading as a career path; I’d starve to death if I relied only on freelance work.
What I suggest is a degree or some education in English or Journalism, coupled with internships working with publications of some sort. Could be web-based. Could be a blogger site. Could be the marketing department of a widget factory.
In my 20+ year career, I’ve been a writer and/or editor pretty much the entire time. However, I’ve worked in the following industries, in the capacity of editor/writer/proofreader/production manager:
•Magazines
•A temp agency, in the marketing department and in the training department
•An industrial power cleaning company looking to document their processes for billing purposes
•A third-party fringe benefits administrator who provided employee benefit packages to employers
•A multinational publishing company, proofing and editing large-scale standardized tests
I’ve freelanced for magazines, newspapers, a software programming company (I edited their HR/Employee Manual), a private author who needed a pair of eyes on her book, and I’ve worked on many, many, many resumes for private individuals.
There are dozens of things you can do with the skill and there’s money to be made if you understand the concept of applying a piece of writing to an adopted style (such as Chicago Manual of Style, MLS, Associated Press, APA, Gregg – there are many). In my experience, the people who woke up one morning and thought to themselves “Hey, I’m pretty good at grammar, I think I’ll go get a proofreading job” have very little experience in production (print or web), have very little experience working with style guides, and tend to miss a lot, i.e., they don’t usually do a very good job. With proper background, training, and experience, a nice little career can be made out of checking other people’s work. But it’s not necessarily a skill that just anyone can walk in off the street and do a good job just because they got As on their papers in school. Anyone can string a sentence together, but not everyone is suited to become a novelist.
Both are true, in my experience. I do tend to proof things backwards on their last journey past my desk on their way to press, and yes. It is a horrible, mind-numbingly boring job that requires an anal-retentive attention to detail.
Major job hazard: Becoming a nitpicky pedantic asshole when you’re *off *work. 
I’ve worked with lawyers at big New York firms that had proofreaders. As they described it, they would do a markup of the document and go home. A proofreader would review the document to ensure that all changes had been accurately made, then circulate it. It sounds like sort of a dubious practice to me, but I never worked at a firm with full-time proofreaders.
For the most important stuff, we don’t use proofreaders; we just have $500 an hour lawyers look really carefully at the prospectus or whatever. But our marketing department does use free-lance proofreaders for our marketing materials, including short articles that we write on legal developments. The proofreaders carefully put everything into compliance with the AP stylebook, and we then have to change everything back to comply with A Uniform System of Citation. So it’s sort of a mutually frustrating experience.
I have been a writer, an editor and - specifically - a proofreader. No, there is no specific career path, nor are there huge career opportunities.
My experience with proofreading has been as a free-lancer, working alongside the moonlighting graduate students, part-time mothers and laid-off copywriters looking for some kind of paycheck. As you can imagine from a setup like that, the money isn’t very good.
My experience proofreading textbooks was the most instructive. We were working on a deadline so we not only had to be perfect, but do it quickly. Some couldn’t handle the pressure and dropped off (or were removed from) the job. We weren’t just looking for spelling and punctuation, we had to make sure the artwork and captions were in the right places, that ruled lines were the proper length, and that each leaf was not only paginated, but laid out with the binding margin correctly on the left or right side. We also had to make sure we didn’t get one state’s pages mixed into another state’s edition, even though they were virtually identicial.
We weren’t supposed to be checking facts. However, there was a case where one of the proofers did actually find a factual error. The supervisors wouldn’t accept her argument until a group of us got together and backed her. Finally they agreed to send the section back to the author for verification.
Like most detail work, it’s easy to get careless with it. Proofreading requires the kind of personality that’s obsessive enough to treat every moment of the job like it’s the very first time, but no so obsessive that you can’t finally say, “this is enough.”
It’s been about 20 years since I took journalism, but I recall that we had a proofreader come and speak to our class. He didn’t make the work sound particularly rewarding, and made it clear that if you’re someone who wants recognition for your accomplishments it’s probably not the job for you, as proofreaders tended to get attention only when they messed up and missed something.
I’ve actually been meaning to start an IMHO thread along these lines, but it’s probably similar enough to warrant a slight hijack of this one: as a newspaper subeditor with 12 years’ experience and a rather pessimistic view of the future of the industry, what else can I do? I think I’m pretty creative with words as well as accurate, and I pick up new software quickly, but whenever I browse job ads, anything that looks within my comfort zone would mean taking a 50% pay cut, and the ones that look more interesting (marketing communications, copywriting, content management) seem to list a string of acronyms in the “required skills” field that have me reaching for Google and scratching my head. 
I am guessing that it is only your innate sense of humility that spared us from the stories about your Pulitzers and Olympic gold medals.
What can I tell you? They exist. Two of them are sitting not twenty feet from me right now. And I’m familiar enough with the operations of quite a few mega-firms to know that they do indeed have proofreaders on staff.
Now, not every document is proofread – documents are proofread upon request by a lawyer. And the lawyers you know may not have mentioned it to you if they used a proofreader from time to time. But I bet if you checked itemized bills, once in a while you’d see proofreading time.
As to lawyers doing proofreading, they do. But clients are increasingly unhappy with paying a first-year associate’s hourly billing rate for proofreading.
If you mean that only people at the absolute top flights of these two particular industries would have any direct contact with or knowledge of fact-checkers and proofreaders, and that accounts for my experience, then, please, go ahead and say so.
Relax. I don’t mean any such thing. I don’t even know what you mean by “absolute top flights” of these two industries. I certainly know enough about lawyers and law firms to know that the size of one’s firm is not an indicator of one’s ability
What I did mean was that lpeople who “have a lot of interactions with lawyers from large law firms” might not necessarily be all that exposed to the inner workings of those firms. I’m not sure clients really care who proofread their documents, as long as they’re correct.