Why sub-editors matter
Although this requires the caveat that if I was in Greg Hywood’s shoes I might feel obliged to do precisely the same thing, the decision by Fairfax Media to outsource its copy subbing is a thoroughly depressing one.
It’s easy to characterise a sub as a copy monkey (and indeed a tradition for reporters to wind them up by doing so) but the art of sub-editing is one of the magic, unseen ingredients of what make newspapers great.
In my years on papers, and later magazines, subs saved me looking liker a plum on many occasions.
Good subs have usually been a reporter first. Sometimes they know more than the reporter about the subject being covered.
@jothornely has a fine point on Twitter, Tim:
“If the typos in this are intentional, it only goes to prove the same point. http://j.mp/kLPJZS”
My favourite is:
“In my years on papers, and later magazines, subs saved me looking liker a plum on many occasions.”
Please don’t fix them. 😉
Back in the old days when I was a humble proofreader at the Melbourne Herald there was a camaraderie on “the stone” as we went to press, that checking of last minute corrections that banter between subs and (proof) readers and typesetters getting the paper to bed. It does get down to economics, I guess, when that banter stops (like the long lunches) and (almost) everything gets outsourced. As a (now) freelance publicist I welcome outsourcing but as a sole trader it’s still a hard road and I feel for anyone “in-house” who gets shunted.
Muphry’s Law strikes, I’m afraid. I counted four typos in this story. How ironical.
Pay for a full-time sub for Mumbrella, do you Tim?
Agree Tim, good subs do amazing things. Big dramas nearly always sorted quietly behind the scenes. Turds polished regularly. Gently nudging of, ahem, journalists in the direction of becoming professionals who can actually write to order.
Back in the day, I officially described a gifted ex Fairfax sub I hired for magazines as “our secret weapon” on expenses documentation. In a tightly contested business segment, we successfully deployed ‘quality’ content as the USP.
That was then. Unique quality content is essential for premium print titles now. Having focused subs with a good feel for the readership who produce clean copy is the simplest way to get a quality daily out.
I know that News Ltd has recently introduced a pooled sub editing function for all its major titles. Maybe Fairfax needs to keep a close eye on its value proposition here?
Fiddling with subs can produce some collateral, situational comedy. A double page news story recently appeared in The Observer with its main picture captioned Insert Caption Here.
Re the churnalistic spiral, do you think copy farming might be next cab off the rank?
Words are a commodity, experience isn’t.
Finding the balance between those two facts is a difficult thing to do in the face of falling revenues.
Ah, Tim. I’ve been at you for a while to do something about the quality of the copy on Mumbrella. I even offered a free trial of my services.
The first eight and last seven paragraphs of this piece contain mistakes. You really need to take this stuff seriously.
I count 11 mistakes…irony or intention? That is the question.
In another life I did a lot of work in a company that was outsourced by several major broadcasters. We would sit, watch, write the headers and descriptions for the TV news stories of the day, chop up the video and send this package back to the client who quickly published them on their sites. Outsourcing online subbies in Oz has been happening for years, successfully.
It’ll be up to Fairfax to train the newbies and provide them with dense documentation if they want this venture to work.
And I’m with @Justin. Mumbrella’s copy is consistently crap.
Exactly the same thing at APN – my former employees. Unfortunately seems the way that all news organisations are going.
From one former journo-sub-editor, now blogger, who could do with a bit of subbing!
Dramatic Irony.
Outsourcing subbing? What next… whole newspapers produced out of Mumbai?
Do people really think that Tim’s typos weren’t deliberate?
Fairfax’s decision to outsource subbing is extremely shirt-sighted and offensive to all concerned about quality. However, I’m afraid the standard of many (but not all, I hasten to clarify) subs on our major newspapers has been on the decline for a long time now.
Most of the art referred to in both this piece and a few of the subsequent comments is a thing of the past. There are still great subs out there but they are increasingly hard to find. A good writer will find more mistakes are actually now made during the actual subbing process than are ever corrected. Sad but true.
Oh and if anyone spots one of those existing good subs I was talking about, could they please correct “shirt-sighted” to “short-sighted” in my comment as above?
Subs are much more than ‘fixers’ or copymonkeys — as you’ve rightly mentioned, they can turn a good story into something much better.
I’m grateful they regularly save my skin (& reputation) by fixing my writing errors… though more importantly, I rate the talented sub who can quickly and cleverly tweak the style, structure, voice, facts (!) and pitch of a story so that it becomes much more engaging. In other words, a good sub will boost readership of story.
As every SEO booster knows, a smashing headline is an awesome way to attract more readers. Experienced subs do this brilliantly. The next step is to keep the reader, well, reading… and again, experienced subs make this happen.
Any writer — journo, opinion-sharer, ‘expert’ columnist, fiction/non-fiction author etc — who thinks their work is good enough without an edit is a wanker.
Stuart Ridley I’d like to know where you work and who your subs are. There are always good and bad subs, but I find more and more frequently, copy is just slashed from the bottom up with no regard to context or how it affects the flow and continuity of a piece. A lot of stories are so woefully cut that the final par doesn’t even make sense.
But still – outsourcing the job means the people who do it have no loyalty to the masthead, and possibly have no experience of its style.
Tragic decision. I’ve hired a few journos in my time, and discovered that despite their great writing portfolio, some of them were most definitely saved by a sub-editor.
Muphry’s Law strikes … pure gold vealmince!
Hywood is doing the right thing. Good subs have almost vanished from the industry, their numbers and importance eroded by many factors, cost-cutting only one of them. Time was when a sub could call over an erring reporter, point out what was wrong, fix it and urge the miscreant to mend his or her ways. (not “their” ways, which is a plural, now commonly misused).
Try that now and you will be answering to HR, and you wil be answering double-quick if the complainants is one of the aggrieved women’s studies grads now infesting newsrooms, especially Fairfax newsrooms.
What I’m waiting to see is what star names Hywood intends to hire with the cash he is saving on subs. If it turns out to be more black-clad, inner-city types wanking on about climate change and nervous disorders in dolphins disturbed by bay dredging, he should just keep the subs.
What is really needed, especially at the Age, are a few voices from the centre and, how daring, maybe even one from the readable right (not you, gerard h.) That would be the best possible demonstration that the former Age, the one that believed Catherine Deveny to be such a circulation booster, is making a rational bid to regain the middle turf. The Herald Sun isn’t making inroads, as its plunging circulation demonstrates, so the market is up for grabs.
Basically, though, Fairfax is stuffed.
Grumpy Old Sub has clearly been out of the workforce for some time, as his description of workplace relations in media organisations bears no relationship to current realities.
Tongue in cheek, Bill Posters? I hope so. Recall the case a few years ago when a senior newspaper executive went drinking after hours at Crown with a bevy of female reporters. The next day he is reported to HR for making an “inappropriate” suggestion to one of the young female reporters. As for being out of the business, yes, I’m more or less retired, but I hung around long enough to see rough and tumble newsrooms become facsimiles of university common rooms. Grumpy old subs were the bulwark against that silliness, but now that they are gone we have papers like the Age, which does not know or understand why the city it serves doesn’t want to read it.
For a second I thought this was a subediting exercise disguised as a blog post.
Yes perhaps, but journalism’s still a profession in decline, isn’t it?
I’d have a little more confidence that Hywood knew what he was about if he didn’t use weasel words/phrases such as ‘deliver the strategy’ and ‘the core of the changes [. . .] will be logic-driven’. Clearly this is a man with no great respect for the language.
It wasn’t one young female reporter – it was two.
And on the subject of typos, I have a feeling that this piece may be titled ‘Why sub-editors matter’ for a reason. Just a hunch.
‘Muphry’s Law’ John Grono? where will this end…..?
New Matilda just put up this fabulous piece:
http://newmatilda.com/2011/05/.....ub-editors
Couldn’t agree more Tim. As a sub-editor myself, I’m appalled by Fairfax’s misguided notion than outsourcing sub-editing can lead to a quality product. It doesn’t.
See http://bit.ly/iUWQRs for more about why it’s rubbish.
Rip-Off Red: thank you for the link, it’s an interesting take (sorry Tim, NM’s version is better quality).
Well worth clicking the Twitter link in the article ( or simply search #fairfax).
Found this golden tweet:
“What do you call a newspaper without sub-editors? A blog.”
I was a sub (and stone sub) when the PKIU was seemingly at the height of its power. But they negotiated themselves into an early death by all their rules and conditions.
Subeditors have done exactly the same thing with the web. Subs refused to touch online copy. They grumbled about workload. They complained about using two different systems. They complained that web copy interfered with their print deadline work. And they even refused to work on other print sections if their own section was finished early.
Instead of helping the system run efficiently they became a problem. So of course better minds than theirs starting thinking of ways to eliminate the blockage.
Now, when it’s all too late, they hope to cut some new deal. That should have happened 10 years ago. I really can’t feel much sympathy.
In the pre-digital era, a sub was a valuable, highly experienced journalistic resource. Recently, at a book launch/memorial for the great Ron Tandberg, I encountered many old colleagues. A few harried, present-day metro staffers also attended, before hurrying back to their large, sparsely populated office. I don’t envy them. Whenever I groan at yet another typo or unattached heading in the papers I once worked for, I recall the pride our subs’ team felt collectively if one of us saved a good reporter’s bacon (and I’ve certainly been on both sides of that relationship) or penned a great heading. Yes, millennial apathy is killing print newspapers, but a thousand cuts have made it a death without dignity..