BY ANDREW KNAPP

As newspapers and media firms look to reduce production costs, some editors said consolidation of an already heavily burdened copy desk is endangering high-quality editing.

In a desperate brainstorming flurry to pacify shareholders before its eventual sale to The McClatchy Co. in June, Knight-Ridder Inc. considered centralizing copy desks at all its newspapers, according to an Aug. 27 article in The New York Times. Under that system, copy editors for the company, which owned 32 daily newspapers from coast to coast, would edit “local” stories datelined thousands of miles away.

“That just suggests they don’t have a clue about what the value of copy editing is,” said John Russial, a journalism professor at the University of Oregon and former 12-year Sunday copy chief at The Philadelphia Inquirer, once a Knight-Ridder publication. It’s vital for editors to have first-hand knowledge of the material they’re editing, he said.

The idea was promptly scuttled.

More recently, the Tribune Co. proposed cuts of newsroom staff, including copy editors. At the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Johnson recently was forced out as publisher after he refused to eliminate positions.

The growing popularity of blogs, which eliminate the middle-man editor, further threaten the profession.

Those events have placed what one Tribune editor called a generally “ignored” and sometimes “scorned” copy desk in an even more precarious position. This is especially true at smaller newspapers where embattled editors’ workload has been mounting since the extinction of composing rooms in the 1980s and the more recent advent of the Internet. More and more copy editors at small to midsize dailies, some with circulations of more than 100,000, oversee design and pagination, along with editing content and uploading it to the Web. Several editors interviewed for this story said that, in a struggle to meet deadlines, increased duties mean less time for fixing factual flops, grammar gaffes and syntax slips — basic elements copy editing.

While many modern copy desks are inherently attracted to the creativity of design and its tendency to eliminate the job’s so-called “drudgery,” editing can suffer, some said.

“The more work you give to one person, after a while, it begins to show in both areas,” said Bill Cloud, a copy-editing instructor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and member of the American Copy Editors Society board of directors. “There’s an aspect of design that’s just so appealing to people that they get too deeply involved and ignore the editing side.”

He said the danger is time and how editors divide it between various tasks.

“Potentially, that can harm both,” Cloud said. “Certainly, it will harm editing, and it could also harm design.”

And the prospect of job cuts and the consequential heavier workload has some copy editors worried about the future of top-notch editing.

More than 20 years ago at newspapers nationwide, a handful of the rule-focused, technology-oriented editors replaced hundreds of compositors who used a traditional method — a razorblade — to cut printed text and paste it onto the page.

Today, copy editors at smaller newspapers compose pages with computer programs such as QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. When hiring, even though managing editors say they seek workers with editing backgrounds, job advertisements increasingly beckon journalists who have proficiency in those programs, said Russial, who has conducted substantial research about copy editors.

Many experts said recently that copy editors rarely perform both pagination and traditional copy editing well. The tasks are too time-consuming. Separating copy editors and designers into two desks is a more ideal setup, they said, but also a costly one.

“It’s not ideal to have copy editors do design, but unfortunately, it’s a staffing situation we have, and it’s not uncommon,” said Juan Elizondo, managing editor of the daily 30,000-circulation Longview (Texas) News-Journal. “We have some staffers who consider themselves primarily designers or primarily copy editors. It’s a juggling act, and there’s constant pull in either direction.”

When Elizondo arrived at the Cox Communications-owned newspaper three years ago, lack of a night-editor position forced copy editors to serve as originating editors, Web editors, designers and proofreaders. “They basically did everything but the reporting,” he said.

Elizondo added a night editor and designated a copy chief whose sole job was to give a final look at section-front stories, not design pages. Ideally, several copy chiefs would handle every section, but the money for additional positions just isn’t available, he said. As a result, most editing focuses on the news section, while others may suffer.

The News-Journal also uses technology to its advantage to mitigate the time issue. Elizondo said the newspaper avoids “overly templated, cookie-cuttered designs,” but copy editors can avoid starting from scratch every day by using design presets in QuarkXPress. Spending less time on design allows more for the actual copy-editing portion of the job.

“That’s one response to deal with that division of labor,” he said. “But it is difficult.”

At The Providence (R.I.) Journal, with a daily circulation around 220,000, technological advances eliminated 300 composing-room employees in the 1980s, according to Len Levin, a former copy chief at The Journal. In 1996, the newspaper employed five compositors, and production tasks once performed in the composing room were transferred to a copy desk that failed to grow despite its increased workload. But Levin said that instead of hiring more, newsroom managers have continued to slash copy-editing positions.

“This has all kinds of repercussions on the desk from morale loss to missing deadlines,” Levin said. “If management is enlightened enough to realize you need a few more people to replace all those hundreds in the composing room, the job can be very creative, pleasant and rewarding. If not, it can be really frustrating.”

Copy editing is admittedly less glamorous than reporting, according to the eight top editors interviewed for this article. And as technology and economics tighten their grips on the copy desk, recruitment problems may arise.

Levin, who derives his “tough and mean” editing style from a reader’s point of view, said pure wordsmiths will always exist. As newsroom convergence and the Internet further pressure educators and newspapers to train the next generation of journalists in digital media, however, focus on traditional copy editing may suffer while aesthetics and newspaper design become the priority.

“I always prefer to edit,” Levin said. “I understand that people want to be creative, and on a newspaper copy desk, I guess laying out a page is the most creative aspect. The spelling of a word is necessary but not necessarily creative.”

In a part-time “retirement” position as a three-day-per-week copy editor at The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., Levin has seen four desk mates in the past six months leave for information technology jobs in Boston. The Ledger, which circulates 70,000 copies daily, places both design and editing tasks on the copy desk’s shoulders.

“Journalism is losing a lot of copy editors that way,” said Levin, who also conducts workshops for professional copy editors throughout New England.

As an advanced-editing professor at the University of North Carolina and an editing coach for the (Greensboro) News & Record and The (Raleigh) News & Observer, Cloud has seen steady copy-editing interest among students and young journalists. The profession, however, is less popular than reporting. One student who originally trained in copy editing and “was very good at it,” he said, found employment as a hybrid editor-designer at a small newspaper.

“But she just kind of drifted more and more into design and now has taken a pure design job,” Cloud said.

Other top editors of larger newspapers acknowledged a more fluid editing process at their publications where design desks are separate from copy desks. At the same time, however, those editors said an increasing number of young designers lack the required news judgment. Copy editors and designers should possess knowledge of the other desk’s responsibilities and collaborate on projects to provide a close correlation between the design and the writing; however, the two should be allowed to specialize, according to Entertainment Editor Anne Glover of the Tampa Bay (Fla.) Times and Assistant News Editor Scott Toole of The Express-Times in Easton, Pa.

With a circulation of 400,000, The (Baltimore) Sun, one of the Tribune newspapers involved in recent newsroom-slimming talks, John McIntyre stressed the importance of labor division among copy editors. McIntyre, assistant managing editor for the copy desk, said few people have “ambidextrous” skills in copy editing and design, and the 24 to 30 workers who specialize in editing aid The Sun’s credibility.

“My area of expertise is language, and what I’m concerned about, and what all copy editors have to be concerned about, are the articles and their headlines,” said McIntyre, a 20-year employee at The Sun and former president of the American Copy Editors Society.

Though he advocated more focus on editing, McIntyre stressed the importance of design in attracting new readers. After the paper underwent a redesign a few years ago, some older readers thought it looked “gaudy and cheap, like a comic book.”

“Those readers are more or less on their way to a place where our circulation cannot reach,” he said.

But McIntyre said his copy desk isn’t immune to increasing time pressures. Intensive design work often causes articles to reach copy editors late and forces them to do the same work in compressed time.

“You cannot diminish the importance of design, but you cannot allow design to mask the essential importance of editing,” he said.

Copy editors correct far more errors than they make.

The Sun reporters account for about 75 percent of mistakes, while the 25 percent introduced by copy editors is a “nefarious” but minor component, McIntyre said.

At the more under-staffed Longview News-Journal, Elizondo said 40 percent of publicly disclosed errors arise from sloppy editing and errors introduced by the copy desk because of a fast-approaching deadline.

For some copy editors, however, increasing time pressures have boosted the attraction of the job. Copy editors typically work “out of sight and out of mind,” several said recently. They work at night and after most of the newspaper’s top editors have left the newsroom. If news breaks after normal business hours, reporters hurriedly write while copy editors hastily edit.

At The (Elyria, Ohio) Chronicle-Telegram, a 24,000-circulation, seven-day newspaper that unveiled a major redesign in November, News Editor Dan Shortridge said most problems with juggling editing and design arise in late-breaking circumstances. The Chronicle-Telegram copy desk comprises five full-time and two part-time editors in charge of production for all sections but sports.

“That can sometimes skew a few things toward more emphasis on speed, and sometimes things do fall through the cracks,” Shortridge said. “It’s unfortunate that it has to occur on such tight deadlines. But that’s one of the exciting things about the job. You’re always on the clock. You’re always under the gun. It can get exciting from time to time.”