♦ Web editor: “We don’t really get snow in Amarillo. We just get Denver’s sloppy seconds.”

♦ Designer: “Do you think if you eat mummy meat you get magical powers? Magical EGYPTIAN powers???”

♦ News editor to copy editor: “What do you know about the Lebanese mafia?”

♦ Business editor: “I particpated in dwarf tossing once.”
Associate news editor: “How far’d you throw him?”
Business editor: “Not very far, but I was hammered.”

♦ Sports reporter, angrily: “Donuts are not an early evening or afternoon snack. Have you ever had a donut craving at 2 p.m.? NO.”

♦ Copy editor: “I’ll celebrate my birthday the same way I’ve done it in the past — shooting terrorists or nazis.”

♦ Designer 1, on the malfunctioning watercooler: “It has feelings too, you know. Maybe it needs a name.”
Designer 2: “What should we call it?”
Designer 1: “R2-H20.”

♦ Freelance cops reporter, re: For the Love of Ray J: “They’re all strippers who show they can do the splits on the first day. On national television. Is that the kind of girl you bring home to your momma?”

♦ Freelance cops reporter, re: his new job as a 7th-grade teacher: “I think the reason I like it is because I have power over 140 lives. I’m drunk on power. Dance, puppets, dance! … The scary thing is they think I actually know what I’m talking about.”

♦ Assistant sports editor, re: negative comments about a Pagan Wiccan woman: “If she doesn’t like it, she can just turn them into frogs.”

♦ Copy desk chief, showing her hatred for Kathy Griffin: “I wouldn’t walk across the street to spit on her if she were on fire.”

♦ Slot editor: “I’m going to play with dinosaurs till I die.”

♦ Copy editor: “It’s a forgy! Because it’s forged by the fires of our passion.”

♦ News editor, concerning a copy editor’s sparkle-threaded jacket: “Where’d you get that? A Michael Jackson auction?”

♦ Designer 1: “Do you ever find yourself wishing you could use InDesign tricks in real life? Like, holding a real-life ’shift’ to move something in a straight line, or grouping things together to move them all at once?”
Designer 2: “I think that means you’re officially a design geek.”

♦ Slot editor: “Could you smell my upper lip? Is that weird?”

♦ Designer, re: an attractive news editor: “He’s wearing his sweater vest of lust.”

♦ Copy editor to slot editor: “You would pay money to see hermaphroditic polar bears?”

♦ Slot editor, re: juggling to the theme from Night Court: “That’s one of the best things I’ve done in my life.”

O Consultor de Textos é um espaço voltado para quem procura uma orientação profissional sobre seu livro ou artigo.

Escrever é despir-se. Não de coisas triviais como calças e camisas, mas de nós mesmos, de nossos rostos e do modo como nos apresentamos ao mundo diariamente. O texto é a nudez mais crua do intelecto, uma expressão pura e cristalina da personalidade. Quando escrevemos um texto, expomos o que pensamos e como pensamos sem qualquer interferência externa. Através desta lente mágica composta das linhas de um texto, ficamos todos resumidos (ou “ampliados”) àquilo que efetivamente somos. Escrever um texto é, afinal, uma responsabilidade por muitas vezes subestimada.

Por que contratar um consultor?

Compor um texto é por vezes encarado como uma arte, por outras, como um teste árduo para a paciência. É, de fato, mais como um trabalho de arquitetura, de design. Não por acaso que a semântica já prenuncie o ato de tecer. Em um texto, tecem-se as ideias, lapidam-se as palavras e esculpe-se a narrativa; seja pelo apuro estético, pela sonoridade específica que se procura, ou por simplesmente permitir que as ideias ali contidas sejam extraídas com clareza e facilidade pelo leitor (algo que, por um estranho paradoxo, é exatamente o mais raro de se obter).

No entanto, é igualmente difícil esperar de alguém que, além de seu trabalho, de sua vida pessoal e de seu exercício para comunicar ao mundo suas ideias e intenções, tenha também tempo hábil para burilar cada pequeno detalhe de seu texto. Detalhes que, aos olhos do leitor, podem fazer uma eloquente diferença. Além do óbvio distanciamento necessário para que um texto seja friamente analisado. Assim como terapeutas que fazem análise com um colega, e cabeleireiros que, é claro, não cortam o próprio cabelo; até mesmo um copidesque profissional solicita os serviços de um colega para revisar seus textos. É líquido e certo: o olhar de outra pessoa trará ao autor perspectivas que ele não havia imaginado primeiramente, e que invariavelmente resultará em um ganho de qualidade.

O Trabalho do Consultor

Há dois pontos que, antes de mais nada, é preciso destacar.

Primeiro, que a preocupação mais elementar do consultor de textos é oferecer como resultado final um material onde seu trabalho seja absolutamente indetectável aos olhos do leitor. O estilo do autor é como sua impressão digital, como aquele tempero individual, pelo qual o chef será amado ou odiado, mas que o identificará como indivíduo. Por isso tudo, ele é sagrado, inviolável.

Segundo, que o consultor é um profissional contratado para moldar o texto ao gosto do contratante, sendo assim, todas as modificações são na verdade sugeridas pelo consultor, nunca e em hipótese alguma impostas. É sempre o cliente que, avaliando o trabalho do consultor, julgará o que deve ou não deve ser feito de seu texto.

Esclarecimentos à parte, além da revisão ortográfica básica, o consultor modela estrutura, atenta para eufonia, sintaxe, semântica, pontuação; reescreve e escreve material inédito sempre que for necessário.

O consultor vai desmontar, analisar e redesenhar o texto como um projeto inteiriço. Por isso, colocar seu trabalho nas mãos do consultor é garantia de receber de volta uma peça artesanal moldada em padrões de perfeccionismo.

O que é a Consultoria

A consultoria textual amplifica o conceito de copidesque (e, em um estado mais nuclear, o de revisor) por oferecer um diálogo contínuo com o autor ao longo do processo. Além do trabalho prático, com a manipulação do material entregue, há a fase que identifica o serviço como um processo de consultoria, onde o cliente possui prazo hábil após a primeira entrega do material revisado para discutir com o consultor e solicitar quantos ajustes julgar necessários. Deste modo, o consultor atua como um conselheiro, praticando uma co-autoria não creditada. O cliente tem a opção de contratar ou não um determinado período de consultoria.

Do Orçamento ao Método

É impossível oferecer um preço final sem que se tenha posto os olhos no material. Depende muito do tempo e do esforço criativo que consome, podendo fazer com que o trabalho flutue desde uma revisão mais simples e técnica até um complexo serviço de ghostwriter. Por isso é necessário o contato com o material para que o orçamento possa ser feito.

O valor é cobrado por lauda (*1 lauda = 1250 caracteres com espaços) e por dias de consultoria. O período de consultoria será o tempo (opcional) pelo qual o consultor ficará à disposição do cliente após a primeira revisão pronta. Serão entregues dois arquivos: o texto limpo, com todas as alterações já feitas, e o texto com cada detalhe de cada modificação em destaque e devidamente explicado. O cliente tem a opção de simplesmente usar o texto acabado, ou pode utilizar as marcações feitas pelo consultor para avaliar, discutir e delinear novas diretrizes. Incluído no processo de consultoria está qualquer nova modificação proposta pelo cliente. Caso o prazo expire, poderá tranquilamente ser renegociado.

Peça um orçamento sem compromisso pelo e-mail:
luisboaventura@ibest.com.br

Management at the Chicago Sun-Times came to their senses and decided not to outsource its copy-desk operations to Canada or India. The move was considered as an effort to cut labor costs by cutting 30 jobs. In reality, it would have provided a daily dose of embarrassment for the paper as readers struggled through mangled copy.

Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune writes this morning:

If you see the colour, er, color returning to the faces of newsroom staffers at the Chicago Sun-Times, it’s because one of their worst nightmares won’t be realised, um, realized.

The need to dramatically cut costs to stem losses remains. A plan to outsource copy editing and page designing to Canada or India does not.

Union officials representing Sun-Times editorial employees said management informed them Thursday that the paper is scrapping the radical January proposal to eliminate up to 30 jobs.

The Newspaper Guild was braced for a fight. But, in the interim, a shareholder-led overhaul upended parent Sun-Times Media Group’s board and a succession of other changes, including John Barron replacing Cyrus Freidheim as Sun-Times publisher and Don Hayner succeeding Michael Cooke as editor.

“We understand the financial difficulties, but this was a big problem for us, said Thomas Thibeault, executive director of the Chicago Newspaper Guild. “You weren’t looking at alternatives to try to save money, you were just putting people out on the street and giving their jobs to people outside our country, and that’s pretty bad.

“Their leadership took a fresh look. They get a 10 on my scorecard today. I think that shows good faith. That doesn’t mean the problems are over. That doesn’t mean the Sun-Times is rich today. That doesn’t mean that the guild won’t have to fight another battle tomorrow. But what it does mean is the Sun-Times took a fresh look at it, and the only denominator that’s really changed is the leadership.”

A spokeswoman for Sun-Times Media did not respond to a request for comment.

Christopher Ave has spent his professional life filing stories to copy editors, the unsung heroes of newsrooms. Now he has put their story is sung. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch political editor has written and recorded “Copy Editor’s Lament”, a song in tribute to all the copy editors who have lost their jobs in the current economic chaos, as well as all the copy editor’s left behind.

“In a way this song is kind of a love letter to copy editors and a mild reproach to people like me who aren’t copy editors and who may not have always appreciated their work,” Ave told Mallary Jean Tenore of Poynter in a phone interview. “A lot of us in journalism sort of chuckle at copy editors’ slavish devotion to style, but you know what? They can really save your butt.”

Here is the song.

The Pueblo Chieftain copy desk, as photographed Feb. 15, 1984, by John Jaques (left to right, and oddly in order of departure from the Chieftain): Ken Noblit, Patrick “Mad Dog” O’Grady, Eric McFail, and myself. The bell was a fixture on the copy desk for a while and would be struck with a resounding gong whenever anyone made an error, missed an error or cracked a bad joke.  It drove the rest of the newsroom to the same level of insanity as those who worked on the copy desk.

The demise of the American newspaper is an interesting lesson in economics. Often we hear the complaint that American workers don’t actually make anything anymore.  This is not true of newspaper workers who make something every day. In fact, they make something new every day.

These workers are reporters and photographers who gather the news, the editors who check their work, the graphics designers who present it, advertising sales representatives who work with their customers to create messages to sell goods and services; the various production and press personnel who get all of this stuff onto plates and eventually on newsprint. All work in a synchronized dynamic assembly line of sorts to create a product that — although it appears under the same nameplate each day — is unique to that day it is published.

If you’ve ever been involved in this process you realize that each day is truly something of a miracle. But now newspapers in communities all over the country are announcing huge debts, layoffs and impending closure. Unfortunately, like the auto industry, a failure to embrace technology, adapt and change is sending the American newspaper the way of all those other fine goods that were “Made in America.”

The Chicago Sun-Times unit of the Chicago Newspaper Guild has been told that Sun-Times Media Group wants to reduce its union wage and benefit package by seven percent. Union participation in the discussion has been requested by management, and meetings are planned soon.

One of the ideas on the table is to shift the layout and copy-editing functions to India. This would displace 25 to 30 jobs, or roughly 20 percent of the editorial workforce.

“My initial reaction is that is not something we are going to go along with and if that forces them to lay people off, we would prefer they do so under the terms of the contract rather than eliminate an entire group of people,” Bob Mazzoni, the Sun-Times’ Guild unit co-chairman, told Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune on Friday. “They obviously have the option … [to] go ahead and outsource anyway and we would take it to arbitration.”

Rosenthal also noted in his blog that the company, which last year cut $50 million in costs and this year has said it plans to eliminate another $45 million to $50 million to stem losses, last week proposed a seven percent cut in compensation for all union workers at the Sun-Times and its dozens of sister Chicago-area publications and Web sites.

Sending the copy desk to another continent isn’t a new idea, it has been suggested at other newspapers as a cost-cutting measure as far back as 2006. Here’s is Joe Grimm assessment in 2006 of the topic as he writes for Poynter. Grimm is a visiting journalist at the Michigan State University School of Journalism.

Copy editors and layout editors are a key component to a newsroom. While city editors and reporters often get the glamour and public recognition, it’s the copy and layout editors who are the nigthly unsung heroes. With keen eyes and skill, they turn good copy into great copy, often in minutes under a tight deadline. They draw on their expert knowledge of their local communities to catch libelous and embarrassing mistakes written into stories by reporters and city editors; mistakes that no editor in India could ever find. Without them, there is no web site published or morning paper on the doorstep.

When a news organization sends those jobs across the world, there’s no telling how poorly their stories will read. What management has to learn is that when the quality of their product goes downhill because of poor editing, so will readership, especially in this highly competitive environment. And we all know what happens to advertising revenues when readership plummets, don’t we?

My friend and former colleague Joyce Garcia, now at the Chicago Tribune, points us to a blog called Stuff Journalists Like. It’s a sendup of Stuff White People Like, a blog that became a book.

Copy editors will identify with some of the items listed at Stuff Journalists Like, especially stylebooks and coffee. (Both could always be improved, of course.) And I’ve known some copy editors who seem to like dressing differently.

Here is some other stuff that copy editors like:

• Stories that get to the desk at the budgeted length and before deadline

• Reasonable headline counts

• Reliable cutline information from photographers

• Remembering the days of sizing wheels and pica poles

• Free pizza

What else do copy editors like?

Que o jornalismo está em crise não é novidade para ninguém. Especialmente esse jornalismo de jornal impresso, que está indo para as cucuias mesmo.

Ultimamente as vítimas preferidas dos cortes nas redações de jornais americanos tem sido os copy editors, o pessoal do copydesk, responsável por revisar o conteúdo das edições. São esses profissionais, tanto nos EUA quanto aqui, que evitam erros da língua e informações desencontradas de serem impressas.  

Segundo a pesquisa “The Changing Newsroom“, realizada pelo jornalista Tyler Marshall e pelo Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 62% das grandes empresas jornalísticas disseram que reduziram o número de copy editors nos últimos três anos. Só 2% dos jornais pesquisados informaram ter aumentado o número desses profissionais.

Imagino que seja por isso que eu tenho visto tantos erros em jornais impressos:

Ainda de acordo com o estudo, apenas 5% dos editores-chefes dos jornais pesquisados (grandes e pequenas empresas) se mostraram confiantes na sua capacidade de prever como suas redações estarão daqui a 5 anos.

Mostly via my friend Pam Robinson –

 Who needs editors? David Montgomery, CEO of Mecom, a European newspaper company, sees little use for sub editors (or “copy editors” for us Yanks), now that there are instantaneous options in digital media.

“Never before has a journalist been able to reach out to their audience without intervention,” Montgomery said, according to the Press Gazette of the United Kingdom.

He’s not wild but senior editors either: ““I come from a world where editor-in-chiefs are control freaks who want to control every word.”

The American Copy Editors Society disagrees. But we’re biased. The International Federation of Journalists is not.

“The elimination of editing altogether of journalists’ work will have a potentially disastrous impact on quality and lower public confidence, adding to the current decline,” said Aidan White, general secretary of the IFJ.

Montgomery says, “Sub-editing is a twilight world, checking things you don’t really need to check. … Senior people will always monitor the content, a core group will create the product.”

We need more checking, more critical thinking, and higher quality, not less.

Remember “President Dewey,” Janet Cooke, Richard Jewell, Jayson Blair, and Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction? There are a lot of other mistakes you don’t hear about, because an editor kept prevented them from publication.

For that matter, we should have challenged the war rhetoric after Sept. 11.  As I started saying years ago, what does a “war on terror” really mean?

Checking the language is more than moving commas around. In the Columbia Journalism Review, Brent Cunningham advocates a rhetoric beat.

If I were in New York, I would have gone to “There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America.” It was a conference to “assess the current state of public discourse — and journalism’s response to it — one year before a hotly contested presidential election.”

After working in New York at a publishing company as an editorial assistant for about six months, I finally was promoted to working on the copy desk, sometimes a thankless job. I learned so much though. I was eager to learn and find out the ins and outs of the world of the reporters, writers and editors. But I got more than I bargained for, which was a big plus. I learned how the magazine got put together: from story starts, art and layout to closing each issue and sending it to the printer.

I met everyone in just about every necessary department: editorial, art, production and sales. And by copyediting everyone’s work, I learned what to do and what NOT to do when writing my own stuff. It was a fabulous learning experience.

The problem was, and still is in many instances, that when you worked on the copy desk, oftentimes you were seen as low man on the totem pole. The reason: I’m not quite sure, especially since the people on the copy desk are extremely important for many reasons.

The copy desk employees make sure the stories are readable and make sense. There are great writers who can’t spell, and there are wonderful reporters who can’t put a story together to save their lives. The copy editor oftentimes saves them and their stories.

A good copy editor typically is a whiz at English grammar and can “fix” a train wreck of a story and make it look like great prose. Or that person can take a good story and make it better. This person also can help cut a story or lengthen one to fit the space alloted for it on a page. The people on the copy desk will lay out the story, add some relevant, cool or funky art to go with it, and then write a snappy, catchy headline.

Let’s not forget research. These overworked and underpaid workers also research facts and check to make sure words, people’s names and titles are correct. And they do it all under tight deadline pressure, only to be looked upon as underlings. However, if these people didn’t exist, newspapers and magazines and the like would be filled with a lot of gibberish and unprofessional looking pages.

So, let’s hear it for copy editors and the copy desk. These folks put in a lot of hard work, stay late, and don’t hear enough thank yous for helping all those writers and reporters look good!

When I started my career in New York, I began as an editorial assistant at a trade magazine. I quickly moved onto the copy desk. I found out pretty quickly that trade magazines pay better than the consumer magazines, especially the fashion ones. Although I never worked at a fashion magazine, I heard all the stories through the grapevine and through friends.

Before landing my first real editorial job, I had a handful of interviews. A couple were at fashion magazines. From what I saw and heard, it’s extremely competitive. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with being competitive, but we’re talking cutthroat. Lots of fashion stuff going on and who wears what and how you look. Hey, that’s great for some people. I’m not knocking it; it just wasn’t for me.

It’s hard enough to live in New York if you don’t make tons of money, so working in trade magazines was a much better choice. I learned a lot and made more money. Not tons of money, but more than I would have made somewhere else.

Remember in the trades, you’re writing for a particular audience, say the CEOs, presidents, general managers of companies. So writing and editing are different from more mainstreams magazines.

After a while I took a job as a reporter for a local newspaper. After editing people’s work for so many years, it was much easier to write. Through my work as an editor, I learned to be a better writer and learned what not to do. I also learned how to put together a story, what’s necessary, research, all that. I wrote about everything: from politics and education to human interest stories and play reviews. I also did a stint as a restaurant reviewer. Problem was, the newspaper sent me mainly to these great restaurants. Way too much good food.

When I finally moved home to Arizona, I did some reporting and writing at some local newspapers and magazines. I like the human interest stories and preferred to stay away from anything political. Just not my thing.

Then I ended up as a copywriter at NextStudent. The company provides student loans for college students. I had never been a copywriter before, so it was a nice change. The audience is different; therefore, the writing style has to be different. It didn’t take me long to settle into my new position.

So, now, I have all different types of experiences as a writer and editor. From working on the copy desk at trade magazines in New York and reporting and writing about local news, to a reporting position in Arizona and as a copywriter at NextStudent, you can’t say my words haven’t gotten around, so to speak.

When old-fashioned typesetting was being fazed out in the publishing industry to make way for desktop publishing, many people wondered what would happen to their jobs. I knew of many people in the typesetting department who had been there for years. They were nervous and anxious about what was going on, if they’d be trained for the new world of publishing, or if they’d be let go.

Unfortunately, many of these typesetters were people who had been in their jobs for years. They were older, many heading toward retirement age. A lot of publishing houses did not see the need to train these people, most of whom were women. So they were fazed right out of the companies for which they worked.

It was sad and such a shame. Many of these people wanted to learn desktop publishing and stay in their jobs. Let’s be real: Who’s going to hire an older woman in her early 60s? It’s unfair, but it’s true. The answer is: hardly anyone.

With the influx of desktop publishing came the layoff of many old-school typesetters. For those of us who were old-school copy desk employees, we were the ones who would learn the new animal: desktop publishing.

New computers called “Macs” were brought in along with experts who would train us. Some of us “old-schoolers” had a difficult time, even a so-called “mental block.” There also were some of us who were angry that the last of the typesetters were let go. They had become our friends and they were loyal, good workers. So, in a way, we were stealing their jobs. There was a mix of guilt and just-plain feeling bad.

However, if we wanted to keep our jobs, we had to deal with it and learn the new system of putting out the newspaper. Not all of us liked it, but many of us had no choice. This was the beginning of a whole new world in publishing.