[5String43]

Re hiring editors:

As it happens, I am a newspaper copy editor - getting set to go to work now, as it happens.

First of all, that's obviously a horrible mistake. And not to be defensive, but everybody makes them - even me, after 40 years in the business.

Especially now, when so many of us have been laid off and the work loads have risen so drastically. You have to work fast, so you read past things like this that really should catch one's eye. That's not to make excuses. It's just to say that things like this happen.

The other more troubling thing, I think, is that the young people doing this work these days seem to not know some of the things you might reasonably expect them to know. Our guys are a really good bunch - there are four of us, and the other three double as designers, so they really have their hands full. But the reporters are amazing. No matter how hard-working and dedicated they are, they're almost all capable of including things in their copy, like the mph figure listed above, without giving it a second thought. People today just don't seem to have a lot of common sense about how things work. They don't know basic stuff and I don't sense that the quality of the educations they got was as good as it should have been. We all work hard to save them from themselves, but sometimes we screw up too.

In this case, the reporter probably just typed it in wrong; but she she should have seen it when she re-read her piece before she filed it. But maybe it didn't dawn on her that hurricane winds didn't blow at this speed. Plus, they're under pressure too - do multiple stories every day, keep raising productivity or someone else will replace them - the news business has become pretty darned tough.

Finally, the emphasis in newsrooms always has been on speed, but now it's become ridiculous. At a couple of the four papers whose copy I work on, reporters are expected to put their stories up on the Web themselves as soon as they finish the story. That's because it's deemed important to have a flow of fresh material going up all the time, especially when they don't publish a hard copy every day, as some of ours don't. That means the stuff that gets put up hasn't seen the steady hand of a cranky, suspicious copy editor who doesn't trust anyone or anything - someone like me - it's raw. Crazy, because I'm there every day and easily could read it, but that's not the way the system is set up.

The ethic today seems to be that fast is better than good. Obviously it is not, but given the conditions in the business, nobody can afford to make waves about this - hell, I was off for awhile and I'm just lucky to be working.