Hail to the copy desk: May it long endure

If you want to feel what it's like to walk a high wire without a safety net, try writing for a newspaper without a copy desk. You may not break any bones, but your ego can be banged up pretty bad.

That's why I broke into a sweat when I read that The Wall Street Journal, historically one of the best edited of newspapers, announced that it was shutting down its global copy desk. If the copy desk disappears from newspapers, it will be the final shredding of a safety net that once included typesetters, those grizzled guys in green eye shades who operated those cumbersome, Rube Goldberg-like contraptions that used to set type in hot lead.

When I was a young reporter, I regarded the copy desk as a sometime safety net, sometime wet blanket. Copy editors were the next-to-last people to see your story before it was set into type. The Linotype operator was the last. After them, your story passed under the eyes of proofreaders, who looked for misspellings, typographical mistakes and even errors of fact and grammar, though improving syntax was supposed to be beyond their purview.

Copy editors often were former reporters whose legs had given out on them and who were positioned around a horseshoe-shaped desk where they could use their knowledge and experience to save reporters and the newspaper from embarrassment. They knew the Associated Press Stylebook forward and backward, and could immediately spot a word that wasn't in Webster's New World Dictionary. Often they killed some of my best lines because they read stuff literally, and I tend to make liberal use of metaphor and irony. But, in the main, they served me well.

I remember the time I wrote a story about a man who was convicted in police court on a charge of wife-beating. I wrote something like this: "The judge recognizes that some men rule their households with an iron hand, but this time, the husband went too far."

The copy desk let the lead paragraph stand but edited out the information that the defendant had replaced an amputated hand with a metal hook and had used this hook as a weapon against his wife. The editor showed a commendable sensitivity toward the amputee but an insensitivity toward my storytelling style.

On another occasion, writing about inflation in prices of reading matter, I noted that the price of a copy of Playboy had "inflated like a bunny with a silicone job." The wet blanket descended with a thud on that analogy.

The copy desk also kept me from showing off with language the average reader might not comprehend. Once, on a story that involved tastes in music, I contrasted Beatles lovers with "Comophiles." The copy editor wanted to know what a "Comophile" was. I told him it was somebody who dug Perry Como. The word wasn't in the New World Dictionary, so it was stricken from the copy.

But over the years, I benefited from the backstopping that started with the Linotype men. These blue-collar workers usually earned better pay than the reporters who fed them their copy, and often had a better command of the facts and the language.

During one all-but-forgotten presidential campaign, I edited a story about the Georgia delegation that was offering Sen. Herman Talmadge as a favorite-son candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. The reporter got the wrong Talmadge: He wrote the name of Herman's Daddy, Ol' Gene, who had long since migrated to a segregated cemetery.

The boss of the Linotype operators was a white-haired old guy with the stereotypical blue-collar contempt for college-educated kids. He called me "Jesse," after a famous Olympic athlete who shared my last name but not my racial genes. He met me on the floor of the composing room and pointed to a galley proof of the story.

"Jesse," he asked, "ain't this-here feller dead?"

I didn't mind being called "Jesse," but it sure hurt to have this guy catch me dead to rights in an oversight.

Now I rely mostly on the editors of the newspapers that carry my column, and they often bring to my attention errors of fact or instances of misleading syntax. I'm grateful for that; age tends to take the edge off my editorial sharpness, and poor eyesight makes it tougher to spot typos. I also e-mail the column in advance to a growing list of friends in markets where the newspapers don't carry the column. They often point out glitches in time for me to catch them before they get into print.

The Linotype operator was long ago rendered obsolete by computerized typesetting. Proofreaders are no longer a part of the editing process. Copy editors are expected to pick up the huge slack left when these two job categories were abolished. They must be up to speed on computer literacy and language usage. It's a lot to ask. Newspapers still have editors who scan reporters' copy before passing it on to the copy desk, but often they're so engrossed in fact checking and screening for libel and bias that they miss little mistakes in grammar and usage.

A reader from Oklahoma recently called my attention to a story about Oklahoma University football coach Bob Stoops. Stoops was commenting on the "ruckus" crowd at a Sooners game. I'm betting that the crowd was not involved in a disturbance in the stands. Stoops probably said "raucous" and the reporter wrote the wrong word, out of either ignorance or carelessness.

"Where were the copy editors?" readers ask.

Probably busy moving the type around on a computer screen, trying to make it fit the designated slot on the newspaper page and struggling to write a headline that tells the story in a narrow, unforgiving space. Even so, they catch many an error before it hits the streets. I dread the day when our local papers follow the example of The Wall Street Journal.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson SC 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.

Gene Owens is a retired newspaper editor and columnist who was graduated from Graniteville High School and now lives in Anderson.