Long live the copy desk

Finally, a story about copy editors. Happiness in five columns. Well, not exactly. According an opinion piece by Lawrence Downes of The New York Times, the news is not good for those who serve as the newspapers' "last line of defense." First, Downes laments the fact that the Newseum, the monstrous new homage to news on the Mall in Washington, fails to pay its respects to copy editors. After describing what copy editors do for a living, Downes notes that these hallmarks of newsroom history are a dying breed. It was his last line, however, that made me think:

... If newspaper copy editors vanish from the earth, no one is going to notice.

Not true! Sure, copy editors are never noticed, until they make mistakes. During my several years on several copy desks, no one ever said "nice catch on that comma in the third graf" or "great job cutting out the jargon in that police story." And the AP editors never once thanked me for letting them know when the numbers in the box scores they sent didn't add up. But, hey, I'm over it.

Several bloggers chimed in on the Downes article, including Kathy Schenck of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

New York Times readers had their say, too. I particularly love this ode, from David Eggenschwiler of Los Angeles:

Praise the poor copy editors, but please don’t bury them. As print and broadcast media descend further into pop gibberish as well as routine solecisms, we need copy editors to slow the slide into bad writing as the public standard. Even with them, I wince my way through newspapers; without them, life wouldn’t be worth living.

And getting back to the Newseum. Although it doesn't boast a specific section dedicated to copy editors, it does have the next best thing. The bathroom tiles are decorated with mistakes and corrections taken from newspapers. Here's an example, from the Web site dcpages.com.