| As I’m sure a lot of you have noticed, even from outside the profession, it’s an interesting time to be in the news business. The early months of the Trump administration have seen spikes in subscriptions to publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times and our own Washington Post. At the same time, hyper-wealthy people are buying and neutering news outlets or suing them into oblivion. Layoffs have hit a series of web-based outlets, including HuffPost, Vocativ and most recently, MTV News. And on Thursday, employees at the New York Times staged a walkout to protest a plan to thin the ranks of editors, particularly copy editors, at the paper. Given all of these elements, I wanted to take a moment to tell all of you about the role that the copy editors in The Post’s Opinion section play in my work. Opinion has a staff of copy editors who work specifically with those of us who write for the section. They read everything I write (with the exception of some late-night “Game of Thrones” reviews, which are handled by our Digital Opinions editor, James Downie) before it’s published and make sure that what I’ve written makes sense, is consistent with our style guide and doesn’t include instances of my particular signature tic, which is typing one word when I actually mean another. They handle a lot of copy: by my count, 42 pieces on Wednesday alone. But they also do a great deal more than simple proofreading. The copy editors step up and help me make sure I’ve gotten the tone of a piece right when I’m writing about a sensitive subject, like the column I wrote about the responses to Otto Warmbier’s captivity. They dig into historical archives to check facts, as Mary-Ellen Deily did for my deep dive on the similarities between the months leading up to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and the beginning of President Trump’s administration. And when I do a big project, such as last year’s series on policing and popular culture, Lydia Rebac stepped up and did a comprehensive fact-check and copy edit of 18,000 words worth of articles. I wanted to tell you all this because copy editors don’t get bylines, and even if they did, those simple lines wouldn’t quite communicate their importance. And at a moment when journalism is struggling to develop new business models, it’s important to explain the infrastructure it takes to produce the work that we do. Without copy editors, my work would have more malapropisms and spelling errors; it would also be less precise. It’s wonderful to subscribe to a publication because you want to support a writer. But if you’re hedging in any way, remember that writers need editors. We can’t do our work without copy editors, and without the subscriptions that support their jobs as well as our own. |
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