» Yikes
I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but the newspaper industry is experiencing some … interesting challenges, shall we say.
“Word out of the Los Angeles Daily Journal newsroom is that the legal paper lopped off its copy desk last night—the whole thing.”How unfortunate. Bill Walsh made the case for copy editing a couple of months ago:
“Readers of top-flight publications don’t get their copy directly from the reporters for the same reason that a stalk of wheat and a cow do not a hamburger make, for the same reason that fiancees don’t have a freshly mined chunk of carbon, mounted on a sliver of ore, deposited on their fingers. We hire editors to make the writing presentable the same way we hire designers instead of letting the stories flow onto the page or the screen scroll-style, a la Kerouac. There is a certain level of refinement that the readers expect and deserve in the presentation.”He’s right, of course, but we’ll see if that makes any difference.
