The importance of copyediting

CNN may claim to be “The Most Trusted Name In News”, but they aren’t above the occasional slip up, such as publishing their editing notes, or “borrowing” rather heavily from their competitors… or both.

Check out paragraph #8 in this story from today’s World Business section of CNN.com:

An editor’s note has been inserted in the text, and published in the story: “Well, at least she’s giving credit where credit is due… but she’s sourced the FT three times in this story… I think we need to remove one or two of them just to make it look like we didn’t just rewrite their article.”

Yikes.

My boss showed me this error an hour ago, and as of this writing it’s still online. (UPDATE: The offending graf was removed by 4 p.m. the next day - online for about 24 hours.)

News on the web may be fast paced, but it doesn’t have to be hasty. About a year and a half ago, CBC.ca introduced something we had wanted for years: a universal copy desk to check and edit stories before they are published online.

Getting funding for this was harder than you’d think. For the corporation’s first 60 years, we simply weren’t a print operation. With the exception of the odd TV caption or graphic, spelling didn’t count for much on TV, and it meant even less on radio - phonetics were more important than accuracy.

Then we started a website, and tried porting radio scripts directly to the web. Ugh. Never mind the uppercase typing, the bizarre punctuation, the spelled-out acronyms and phonetic last names… the grammar and spelling were atrocious. For more on these growing pains, see the excellent CBC.ca 10th anniversary item “CBC Learns to Spell” by Blair Shewchuk.

I was around for a few momentous typos and spellos (a term my friend uses for words that are misspelled not by accident, but because you really didn’t know the right spelling and didn’t check.) I got to witness e-mail pouring in about the giant 1997 CBC.ca headline “Death of Diana, Princess of Whales”. And I was able to save our Archives site from a reference to “no holes barred wrestling” (ouch.) But I’ve probably perpetrated a few doozies myself.

At least, I would have, if not for having a diligent editor and proofreader.

Most CBC news, arts and sports stories are now filed to a copy desk that is staffed (almost) around the clock. This team of editors is wonderful - they have to know their Gretzkys from their Gzowskis, and turn stories around in no time flat. (We don’t use them for the Archives site, but we have a freelance copyeditor who is diligent beyond reproach.) To keep up with breaking news, hot stories are sometimes published directly and edited on the fly, but for the most part a second set of eyeballs sees things before the public does. When we slip up, there’s a link on each news story for users to Report a Typo.

You might think that means we’ve finally got things figured out, but amazingly, copyediting is a hot topic once again. As CBC prepares to roll out the “myCBC” project in Vancouver, we’re faced with new (to CBC) concepts like citizen input, user-generated content and TV and radio reporters filing directly to the web. I certainly hope that all these things go through an editor, but it’s by no means certain.

Perhaps I’ll print out that CNN page and post it on a few strategic walls….

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 05-14-2007 | 05:05 PM
Posted in: CBC | Teh Internets