Pity and error

The Tribune has been running a headline competition in recent months, and with the self-effacing reticence that characterises our profession, I have been showing off shamelessly trying to win it. (Not entirely successfully: because you have to be nominated by your peers to get in, not all one’s efforts bear fruit. On one story about enfant terrible Jake Chapman’s first solo art exhibition without his sibling Dinos, I wrote the kicker “Art brother, where are you?” and sat back in proud expectation, only for it to pass through the revise queue without comment and vanish from sight.)

You would think such competitions would be the pinnacle of a sub-editor’s career – that success would be like winning an intra-office Oscar. But of course they aren’t: copy-editors are not naturally born to triumph. The yardstick that really measures our lives is a much more negative and sobering one: the corrections column.

Perhaps there are some of us who never feel the need to look at them, or read the daily email of shame from the readers’ editor, but on the Tribune’s business desk, the Production Editor and I are riveted to the corrections. They appear on our Visual Planner software on Friday afternoons in the Comment section, at which point work fairly soon stops and we click to view. Even before calling up the preview, you can see on the little page thumbnail how many corrections there are from the size of the box: just a few inches deep, with a reader’s letter underneath? Phew: not too many this week. Filling the whole depth of the column? Uh-oh.

Then we begin reading, nervous of seeing a subject or headline we recognise. “In our recipe for sourdough batons…” Nope. “Mussorgsky did not, as we stated last week…” Nope: Review section. “In our story on British technology startups …” Oh shit. Crushed again by a misconverted currency or even a reporter’s error that we could have discovered with a little more effort, we confess to each other our sins.

My own career low point occurred when an entire corrections columns ended up being filled with errors perpetrated in a piece I had edited. Written by a famously bohemian correspondent in New York about former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, it arrived from the desk very late and full of vaguenesses, writerly flourishes and unrebutted hearsay. Foolishly, given the hour, I thought to myself “I can save it!” and tried to fudge or cut as much as possible of the dubious stuff so as not to miss deadline. (MEMO: Never do this. No matter how late it is, if a piece is obviously undercooked and substandard, send it back and have a row with the desk. You can’t “save it”.) Brown rightly complained and it emerged that, in the chaos, I had even contrived to miscalculate her age.

None of our anxiety about corrections is relieved by the emerging phenomenon of what we might call Readers’ Editing as Performance. This blog has fulminated before about corrections columns that have fun picking apart the editorial cartoon or making erudite jokes about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It’s all great fun for the people who haven’t made the mistake: and when it isn’t really a mistake at all, even those jokey “corrections” still rankle. That’s why, despite the cock-up being as good as this one – because, you know, the irony – you can’t help feeling a pang for the person who missed it.

(h/t Joe McNally at Horny Handed Subs of Toil)

Corr values

Ceaseless vigilance, that’s our creed, as demonstrated by a colleague last week:

Key to screenshot:

Orian Lockhart Spelling of quoted person’s name offered by the writer

((CORR)) CORRECT mark from the writer. This spelling is CORRECT. No need to check this

Oriana Leckert Actual spelling of the quoted person’s name, as googled and corrected nonetheless by the sub-editor

Text in blue Deleted text

Text in yellow Text ready for publication

It’s enough to make you want a short holiday, rescheduled from last year as a result of Covid travel restrictions. Fortunately, that’s just what’s coming up! The blog will return, trundling its wheelie case back from the airport, next month: see you then.

In this remarkable dispatch

May I present: the Ten Minutes Past Deadline Self-Promotion Phrase Generator.

1. CHOOSE ADJECTIVE	2. ADD NOUN
exhilarating	exposé
caustic	memoir
rollicking	revelation
plangent	essay
dazzling	attack
excoriating	critique
luminous	tour d’horizon
devastating	dispatch
gripping	account
hilarious	riposte
pulsating	survey
Hogarthian	rebuttal
revelatory	conspectus
sparkling
fiercely intelligent
vivid
shattering
remarkable
frank

It was while we were discussing the headline “Celeste Barber mocks backflipping athlete in hilarious new post” a few weeks ago, apropos of another matter, that Picky, that acute observer of the editorial scene, asked: “How hilarious is it?”

That is a good question. The assertion of salience, or quality, is one of the most uncomfortable techniques of newspaper rhetoric that a sub-editor has to negotiate. When you claim it in relation to the work of a third party, as in that case, you come close to confronting the often circular process of news editing (Why are we running this? Because it’s hilarious! Who thinks it’s hilarious? Er, we do!). But the discomfort is at its most acute, or I find it so, when you have to puff up your organisation’s own work.

The code-phrase at the Tribune is “remarkable dispatch”. When the editor wants attention drawn to the quality of one of the offerings, he makes an expansive gesture and says: “And the standfirst needs to be, you know, ‘in this remarkable dispatch, our foreign affairs editor’, etcetera.” We don’t have to use those exact words, but we are on notice that self-promotion will be required.

So we do it, but in an embarrassed, broadsheet way. Redtops, by contrast, although not ones to hide their lights under a bushel, do surprisingly little puffing-up of individual articles, beyond a terse “SUNSPORT EXCLUSIVE” above the byline. The real home of self-certified brilliance is the mid-market tabloid, by which of course I mean (mainly) the Mail. So for those like me who find their innate self-doubt gets in the way when having to write this sort of thing, Derry Street offers a masterclass.

For a start, very few things at the Mail are described as “coruscating”, which will come as a relief to style guide editors everywhere.* (In fact, the phrase “coruscating dispatch” seems to be a googlewhack – that is to say, a search for it on Google only returns one result anywhere on the internet.) Some things are “excoriating” and others “searing”, but fewer than you might expect. There is a scattering of “devastating critiques“, but what there is a lot of – an awful lot of – on Mail Online is “gripping dispatches“:

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Perhaps that’s the way to do it: pick a phrase that works and stick with it. But which phrase? Well, why not try the all-in-one, mix-and-match Self-Promotion Phrase Generator, specially tailored for broadsheets? Pair any two and see how you get on, or keep it bookmarked for those occasions when what you’re editing isn’t really a “dispatch” (or – whisper it – all that remarkable).

*The Tribune’s style guide says the following: “Coruscating means sparkling, or emitting flashes of light; people seem to think, wrongly, that it means the same as excoriating, censuring severely, eg ‘a coruscating attack on Clegg’s advisers’.”

Happy Chriftmafs

The Tribune celebrated a birthday recently – not a milestone one, but still a pretty impressive number (it’s quite venerable, the Tribune). To celebrate, we reproduced an advert from its launch in the 1790s, and it’s striking how the stated mission then still resonates today, two centuries later.

Unbiaffed by Prejudice? Yef. Uninfluenced by Party? Abfolutely. Whofe Object is Truth, and the Diffemination of Every Species of Knowledge? How can you doubt it? (20 BEST POTATO RECIPES – FROM SAAG ALOO TO PERFECT CHIPS – FREE INSIDE!) Difpatched from London early on Sunday Morning? Give or take. (“Is there late football? I said is there late football? Well, that gives us at least 20 more minutes, doesn’t it? So we can we look for a better picture? We must have a better picture than this. Ask pics if they’re coming through yet. Look, it’s ‘news’. Some ‘news’ has happened and we’re a ‘newspaper’, so I was thinking we ought to try to get it in…”). Delivered in every Part of Great Britain with the utmoft Expedition? Well, see above. (“Whoever told you 7.20 for first wants shooting. We’ll have nothing for Scotland if you miss the trucks, and they may have to run long on the third at Manchester, in which case it’ll be fourth edition central London only and no slips, I don’t care if Elvis comes back to life, once the plate’s on that’s it, and we’ll have to talk about this on Tuesday because it’s SLIDING and we can’t HAVE IT.”)

Heaven knows what it must have been like trying to produce a national newspaper before there were railways, especially on the sabbath, and with the threat the mail coach might be waylaid by highwaymen just outside Finchley. Launching on 4 December, too – just in time to catch the Christmas advertising rush, although presumably they missed out an issue, as I can’t imagine that, three weeks after the inaugural paper, they published on Christmas Day. (This is one of the many unlooked-for benefits of working for a Sunday newspaper: every seven years, Christmas Day falls on a Sunday and, as all the newsagents are shut, you can have the whole of the previous week off.)

In fact, that’s going to happen next year: now there’s a cheery festive thought. On which note, may the blog take the opportunity to wish everyone an early happy Christmas, a freedom from all alphabetical viral variants and a lot more of what may conduce to the Happinefs of Society in the new year.

The Lada of success

Along with the headlines we dream of one day writing (my ambition is to get “Crema vs. Crema” on a group test of espresso machines), I’m sure I’m not the only sub-editor to fantasise about making a stunning save on deadline – a last-minute intervention that prevents a disastrous error getting into print, and shows off one’s combination of erudition and alertness. One of those cool foreign-desk moments, pulling an earbud out of one ear to shout over to the desk: “My Pashto’s pretty rusty, but it sounds like the Mullah’s saying ‘retreat’, not ‘surrender’.” Except that, when my moment finally arrived, I didn’t get to say anything as cool as that. Instead I had to go up to the back bench, and, within earshot of most of senior management, mumble “excuse me, I think this is a Moskvich”.

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The occasion was a colour feature about Havana and the struggle of its taxi drivers and mechanics to keep their old Lada cars on the road. Vivid, atmospheric, rich in castroismo, it was very Tribune. The trouble was, alongside the enthusing about the Lada’s Italian heritage and classic 1960s lines was the picture above. “A Lada car on the streets of Havana Centro” the caption says, but as someone who spent far too much of their childhood reading The Observer’s Book of Automobiles, I wasn’t so sure.

The picture editor gave me one of those picture-desk stares. “I don’t really know a lot about cars,” he said. “It says it’s a Lada.” “Ah yes, but if you look here below the rear window pillar, there’s a cabin air vent, whereas on a Lada …” “Yes, OK, if you say so.” I returned to the back bench. “Yes, I think we’d better change the pic. You see if you look at this feature here above the rear wheel…” “Yes, OK, can you just make sure it’s right? Thanks.” I returned to the subs’ desk in dorkish pride, looked round at my colleagues, thought about explaining what had happened, and decided to spare them.

(However, for those interested … If you look at the picture above and compare it with this fine machine belonging to the Policía Nacional Revolucionaria, which really is a Lada,

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  ^{A Lada police car in Cuba. Credit: Kenyh via Wikipedia}

you will notice that the blue car has a small vent on the side of the body, above the rear wheel, whereas the police car doesn’t; instead it has a similar vent actually mounted on the rear cabin pillar.

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Then, when you start looking properly, you can see the blue car has a curved crease, or wing line, running the whole length of its side, culminating in a vestigial tailfin, whereas the Lada does not. Also (he continued), although the blue car has lost its lights and badges, you can see that the radiator grille is a different shape and that the indicators, if they were still there, would be in a completely different position. (Could it be one of the very earliest Ladas, you’re asking? Ah, but they had round headlights. These ones, or what’s left of them, are clearly rectangular.) I’m confident that the blue car is in fact a Moskvich 2140 – a model, as we know, developed out of the classic Moskvich 412 – built in the USSR from the 1970s until the end of the Cold War.)

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  ^{A Moskvich 2140. Credit: Asterion via Wikipedia}

Not only that, but as I hunted for a replacement, it emerged that several other Cuban vehicles in the picture library were being wrongly advertised as Ladas, including this one, which is clearly another Moskvich,

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and this one:

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Good lord, man, that’s a Renault Dauphine.

But nonetheless, we were spoiled for choice with the images. A Lada with a hammer and sickle decal on its side. A Lada with its occupants waving the bandera nacional triumphantly from the windows. And the winner: a young couple kissing passionately between two parked Ladas in front of a sunlit mural of the revolution. Cuba can make anything look romantic.

O Capt, my Capt

Captain Sir Tom Moore? Sir Captain Tom Moore? Not everybody got it the right way round when the Burma veteran and beloved fundraising champion died earlier this month, but on our subs’ desk we were wrestling with a different question. Should we be abbreviating his rank?

The style guide editor emails:

There’s been a divide on this in terms of whether to abbreviate the Captain to Capt, as per the military ranks section of the style guide. That section refers to how to describe serving officers, but in Moore’s case he was retired, and had actually been promoted to honorary colonel last year. Captain Tom was the nickname by which he was known so shortening to Capt Tom seems a bit jarring. 

I understand shortening to Capt might be useful for tight furniture, but doesn’t seem necessary generally. The case seems similar to other examples where a rank has become part of a nickname or refers to a fictional character – we wouldn’t write Capt Beefheart, Col Tom Parker or ground control to Maj Tom.

Accordingly, the style guide now reads:

That seems fairly comprehensive: I don’t think even the Telegraph’s style guide addresses that last issue.

But the good thing about working at a broadsheet is that you never have to stop making distinctions. The deputy production editor replies:

In fact, he had no right to be called Capt Moore [the abbreviated form] anyway. You have to be a Major or above to retain your title in retirement (in the army; a naval captain is a higher rank, so can be retained). https://www.debretts.com/expertise/forms-of-address/professions/the-armed-forces/

Even at a left-leaning, republican-curious publication such as the Tribune, an appeal to Debrett’s like this glows with prestige. (And it can also help with some of those baffling ranks. L/CoH? No, me neither, but it’s “Lance-Corporal of the Horse”, in the Household Division.) Now the only question is: what to do about Adm Ackbar?

On air

A liquid nitrogen tank has ruptured in a Georgia meat plant and six people are dead, from a grim combination of freeze-burns, or suffocation, or both. However, the Tribune’s hasty first report tells readers, in the time-honoured phrase, that “the leak was contained and not airborne”. That sounds reassuring, until a technologist friend messages to say: “Really? In that case it was probably the fact that they cooled the factory to -196C that caused the problems.”

Liquid nitrogen is liquid under pressure, but vaporises at just above -200C, so when it leaks it instantly boils. At ambient temperatures it’s always a gas, and therefore always airborne. In addition to its dangerous capacity to freeze whatever it touches, in a confined space it can also displace all the breathable air and cause asphyxiation. As my technologist friend put it, “in the event that you do have a nitrogen spill, the last thing you want to do is contain it”. The best thing to do is to vent it into the outside air – which is already 78% nitrogen, after all – at which point the suffocation danger evaporates. The less contained nitrogen is, the less dangerous it is.

In the shock of the event, the media wasn’t the only institution that seemed confused about this. The phrase “contained and not airborne” appears to have originated with county education officials, per AP, who kept children indoors at a nearby school – even though, of course, the air inside was already heavy with nitrogen, as all air is everywhere. The authorities also closed the road outside the plant, out in the open air, for over half a mile in each direction.

Why? Because that’s what you do. That’s the natural instinct when, lacking technical insight, you hear of a fatal gas leak. Stay indoors, contain, evacuate. Those are also the kind of questions reporters reflexively ask at press conferences. Has the gas escaped? Is there a cloud drifting over the city? You need a certain level of scientific knowledge to appreciate that a substance can be dangerous without being poisonous and that, if so, the measures to deal with it may be significantly different to those for dealing with toxins.

In a building full of arts graduates, which is essentially what a newspaper is, there may be a dozen people who can dissect a party conference speech, but often not one with reliable knowledge of the fifth most abundant element on Earth. An arts graduate myself, I email the news desk, hesitantly explaining what’s just been explained to me. We decide to delete that line from the story and await developments. Eventually, one of the wire services has the bright idea of calling the experts for comment, and receives the following response:

That explanation finds its way into the Tribune report and everyone else’s (even though in some cases the quote from the school board is also retained). The story is clarified. But it has revealed, once again, a blind spot in the reporting process.

As journalists, we rely on ourselves for political, sporting and cultural analysis, but are almost completely dependent on outside sources in scientific matters. What we have instead is a reservoir of layperson’s assumptions, apparently similar precedents – and, sometimes, cliches – that we draw upon at the first confused press conferences after a disaster.

The Tribune has tried to address this shortcoming in the past. We have had teams of scientists visit us to try to explain what successful new medical trials do, and don’t, signify, and how they should be reported. But perhaps the most useful resource for a hard-pressed former English student is knowledgeable STM friends who are not shy of getting in touch when, say, a basic arithmetical error appears on the website. If you are a mathematician or a scientist and you know a sub-editor, don’t be afraid to call if you’ve noticed something wrong. I promise we’ll be grateful.

On the night shift

Just one more quote from Roy Shaw’s book How Newspapers Work, because I can’t resist. This time it’s his cinematic depiction of the waning hours of the night shift:

Outside the main news room the specialist writers’ rooms are in darkness. Among the series of teleprinters one machine remains switched on, still occasionally bursting into life as the tail-end of the night’s news comes through. One copy taker broods in a lonely pool of light around his typewriter, waiting for the very last of late night stories from staff reporters or local correspondents. One reporter, isolated among rows of deserted desks, waits to see if that very late story – if there is one this night – requires any attention from him.

One or two sub-editors sit among the night’s debris of scrawled-on and discarded copy paper, and page plans and tattered copies of earlier editions, rummaged through, studied and left scattered. They wait now for any attention that a late story may demand from them, buoyed up, perhaps, by the romantic notion that they may be the heroes of the night, seizing upon the great, late story and magnificently scooping their rivals with a dramatic, final change of page.

Sadly, in fact, the lot of all these “late stop” men is one of tedium followed eventually, at around four or five in the morning, by the releasing thought that whatever news comes now will be too late for that day’s paper.

That was how it was, I am sure, at a well-ordered paper produced in hot metal. On an InDesign paper, though – particularly one with a culture of revisiting pages and an endlessly excitable editor – there was altogether a lot more going on.

In the old days on the Tribune night shift, you could send four pages at 8pm for second edition, 12 pages at 10pm for third, another 12 for fourth at midnight, and then another four, if you wanted them, for the fifth at 1am. Thirty-two possible plate changes in total, and we used to use them all.

We would take over straight after the first edition had gone to press at 6pm (or, frankly, some time later). The day shift would go home, the crossover day/night workers would go for a break, the night production editor and her deputy would go into the late conference, and if you were on the 6pm-2am graveyard shift, you would be briefly left alone in the newsroom, the deserted bridge of a ship, earnestly hoping that the phone wouldn’t ring. (If it did, you would have no choice but to answer it with a crisp “Newsroom”, and then, in all probability, interrupt conference to explain in front of senior management that, eg, the front page had been sent without the barcode.)

If you were already in conference, by contrast, the editor would be flicking through the proofs in a random order with an increasing sense of restlessness, issuing a string of instructions about redesigns, story moves and page swops that you could barely scribble down fast enough. Emerging slightly dazed, with usually less than an hour to second edition, you would then have to triage the corrections for speed of completion, prioritising either the most egregious errors or the easiest ones to fix, to fill your three page slots for 8pm (the fourth being taken by the front page, which has to be sent for every edition even if it hasn’t changed).

As the crossovers returned from their breaks and the newsroom filled up again, you would push more changes out into the subs’ queue to be done in edition-time order (marked “8pm”, “10pm”, “12 or later”). Then would come the most difficult part of the evening; organising the “linked pages” of corrections.

For instance, imagine that the editor wants to make the whole of page two into a “turn page” for the splash, to give more space for the text overspilling from the front page, because new developments emerged as the first edition was going to press. To create that space, he wants to remove the turn of the other front-page story, currently at the bottom of page two, and put that on page seven, where it is vaguely thematically relevant. To make space on seven, the story in the last column will be moved to a similar sized slot on page 11, and the story currently in that slot on page 11 will be moved to page three, where it will function as a companion piece, crushed down into a short text box.

That’s a fair amount of work: re-editing the splash, re-cutting the other front-page story into a different shape, a light trim for the page seven story in its new slot, a redesign for pages two and three, and a heavy cut for the story moving from page 11. But the most significant thing about it is that none of those things can happen unless all the others happen at the same time. You can’t, say, take in the new splash with its longer turn on page two, send those two pages for third edition and then do the rest later, because the other front-page story will lose its turn and end in the middle of a sentence on page one. If you change page two and set up the new turn on page seven as well, that problem is solved, but then the story bumped off page seven will disappear for third edition readers and reappear for fourth edition readers  – hardly a satisfactory solution. And ideally, it would be best to get the updated splash on the page as soon as possible – but you have five linked pages in the run and only four slots available for 8pm. So in conference, heart sinking slightly, you scribble  1→2→7→11→3 on the top of your notepad and brace yourself for a busy third edition.

Then imagine that there is more than one run of linked pages to do that night (there often was). Or imagine that, say, the other story on the crucial page seven is also being refiled and will need a new picture, but might not be ready until close to the 10pm deadline, or might miss it altogether. Or imagine (thankfully, this is slightly before my time) that several of the linked pages in the run are in colour, but you’re only allowed a limited number of colour plate changes per edition.

It was non-stop. The hours used to fly by. After the 10pm edition, with some of the work for midnight already done, there would be time to tackle the office picnic of French bread, cheeses and salami, laid out on an empty desk. Then we would be back for another 16 plate changes – this time without the crossovers, whose shifts had come to an end. I would go home between 1am and 2am – not as bad as for Shaw’s “late stops” – fall asleep around 3:30, then wake up in late morning to the local dance station’s ambient techno show, designed to soothe people surfacing after a Saturday night on the town. It was oddly appropriate, because the night shift used to feel similarly exhausting and eventful: like clubbing, but without the euphoria.

It’s all changed now. The Tribune’s night shift was heavily reduced years ago, when cost-saving measures came in, and has been further cut back for logistical reasons during the epidemic. If there was ever a chance to sit in an Edward Hopper pool of light, waiting for the teletype machine to start clattering, it’s probably gone. And I’m grateful to have been on the day shift now these many years. But I still sometimes miss the feeling of walking into the newsroom as others are walking out, the quiet falling and the sun setting, and waiting to be handed the baton.

La Traviata and violence

Sondheim and gin bars. Peter Pan and air pollution. Artemis and boardgames. LA TRAVIATA AND VIOLENCE!

This is our world. This is the broadsheet chiaroscuro of the Tribune’s early pages list, waiting for us on our desks when we arrive on press day. This is what they want! (Or at least, sales are declining more slowly than they were.)

Let’s hope for more of the same next year, though with more bright skies than dark. Happy Christmas, everyone.

The Second Sub-editor Ever To Be Portrayed On Film

Image: 20th Century Fox

The copy chief hands him the file with the typed copy in it, and the man sitting at the desk takes out his pen. The newsroom is dark, the clock is ticking, and the most important and sensitive story he will ever edit has arrived – like all important and sensitive stories – right on deadline. He looks up at his manager, the two men alone in the office at an epochal moment for journalism and America. “You’ve got half an hour,” says his manager gruffly.

For years, only one copy editor had ever appeared as a character in a feature film: Lou the front-page sub in Ron Howard’s 1994 comedy The Paper.* But now there are two, because in Steven Spielberg’s latest film, The Post, the focus is almost as much on newspaper production as it is on newspaper editing and reporting.

The story of the Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers – the leaked documents that destroyed the credibility of the war in Vietnam – is a subject worthy of what my boss at the Tribune refers to as “late-period Spielberg”: those recent films of his that tell huge American stories magisterially, at a medium pace and with limpid period detail. The ethical struggle between the first amendment and the security state is an eternal theme, taken up in several movies. But for someone like me who started their career in the Quark XPress era, it’s the recreation of a 1970s newsroom that’s really mesmerising.

There are enormous ties, and early colour TVs, and people in the background flicking through galleys with a familiar look of rising concern on their faces (is there a page missing here, or is this actually what was filed?). There are linotype machines filmed in fascinating close-up, real slugs coming out and being loaded into formes, famous headlines shown reversed in metal. There is also – and this is the thing I most regret never having seen – a pneumatic-tube messenger system for sending copy to the composing room in metal cylinders.

And there is also a copy editor. Only one, again, as in The Paper (although, to be fair, he and the copy chief had probably stayed behind specially). And he barely speaks, except to ask for a messenger tube. But you can tell he’s a copy editor, because the first thing he does, with the presses trembling, his proprietor under pressure and the reputations of four presidents hanging in the balance, is calmly cross out the first sentence of the story.

Then as now, sometimes the most important cut is the one you make in the first paragraph.  I like to think it said something like “Bombings and deception and McNamara, oh my!”. But it was probably something more like: “It’s official …”.

 

* To be absolutely accurate, as readers have pointed out previously, Drew Barrymore’s character in Never Been Kissed is also, notionally, a copy editor: but as she (a) appears to have an office to herself and (b) gets sent out on a whim to off-diary feature assignments, you would be forgiven for mistaking her for a columnist.