As breaking news gets published online immediately and copy editors’ jobs get outsourced to India, China and the Phillipines, the future appears to be gloomy for copy editors.

"A lot of reporters are filing directly to the Web, without anyone editing a story," said Detroit Free Press recruiting and development editor Joe Grimm at the convention.

"That gets the material out fast, but it has mistakes in it."

This poses an obvious threat to newspapers’ credibility and accuracy, which is one of their remaining assets over other media.

"We're disrespecting online readers by not giving them the same level of editing," said Chris Wienandt, ACES president and business copy-desk chief at The Dallas Morning News.

"I think people expect a newspaper site to be an extension of the newspaper, so I think the quality of the editing and thoroughness of the editing on the Web site should match the thoroughness of the editing that you get in the newspaper."

The biggest problem comes from newspaper blogs, which are often submitted to even lesser control by copy editors than the online edition.

"I wish we had enough people to edit all that stuff, but we don't. But I'd rather see typos there than in the paper," said Kathy Schenck, assistant managing editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Perhaps it seems more ‘acceptable’ to have a typo in a blog than in a printed headline, but that notion is tied to an antiquated view of the newspaper. In fact, the accuracy and spell-checking of a newspaper blog should be just about as high as the printed editions, as they are all now part of the same offering.

So newspapers still need copy editors. And as reminded by many copy editors at the convention, the larger amount of text now available online and in blogs should make copy editors’ role even more essential – and not the opposite.

Source: Poynter