Errors in “Around the County” stories in last Monday’s city and final editions show how much this business has changed in the 25 years since I started as a reporter for The San Diego Union.
When I covered education, I remember watching in horror as the late Walter McArthur, then an assistant city editor and later the newspaper’s first ombudsman, held a ruler to pages of my prose that had been glued into a long strip. He ripped my story in half.
Those were the days of manual typewriters, rubber cement and Teletype machines; of copy editing that was a combination of rip-and-paste and heavy dark pencil marks. Neatness did not count. We had typesetters, hot metal type, green eye shades and proofreaders. It was low tech and high effort.
Editors still cut stories when there are more words than space. That has not changed. What has is the process a story goes through from the time a reporter writes it to the time it appears in the newspaper. One critical difference is, although editing changes are made, no one retypes the entire story. Another is that a copy editor now does the work that once took two other people. Fewer eyes, more chance for errors.
Gone are copy kids who carried stories from desk to desk. (This newspaper no longer has copy boys and girls; it has editorial assistants, some with computer skills that put reporters and editors to shame.)
Now, the business is high tech and high effort. The jobs of typesetters and proofreaders of yore are the task of a copy editor. A reporter writes a story on computer instead of a typewriter or Teletype. It is sent electronically to the metro desk where it is edited. The editor moves it, again by computer command, to the layout desk. An editor there measures it, assigns a headline size and sends it to the copy desk.
A copy editor reads the story, makes style and other changes, writes a headline and moves it to the “slot.” That is the copy editor who does the final read and types the computer commands that set the copy into type. It is possible to go through all those steps with no one ever once holding a single piece of paper in hand. It is not smoke and mirrors; it is computer screens and keyboards with endless functions.
All those years ago when McArthur tore my story in half, he crumpled the discarded pages and tossed them in the wastebasket. There was no chance those words would get into the newspaper.
Errors in last Monday’s paper show deleted words can now get into the newspaper. It is not the computer’s fault. It appears someone made a computer error and words not meant to appear appeared.
Redundant and nonsensical stories resulted.
A story that in the county edition said: “homicide detectives are trying to identify a middle-aged woman whose body was found Friday…” appeared in the city and final editions this way: “detectives are trying to identify a middle-aged woman who was found dead whose body was found Friday…”
The story was coded correctly for the first edition. Something went awry when it was reset for later editions. For the first edition, extraneous words (“who was found dead”) that appeared in later editions were underlined with wavy lines on the computer screen to show what had been edited. Words so marked do not appear in type. Apparently, for the later editions, someone accidentally erased the wavy lines and the edited words were set into type.
Years ago, the words would have been penciled out. The typesetter would not have typed the words. Even if he or she did, a proofreader might have caught the error. I say might, because newspapers of yesteryear were hardly error-free.
A reader clipped out two stories with the most blatant errors and wrote: “Great writing, great writing.” “Terrible.” “Where are the editors?”
Will it ever happen again? Perhaps. Human error is always possible. And with computers, a new way to make a mistake is but a keystroke away.
Last Wednesday was the 53rd anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Some of those who lost loved ones, who remember what it was to go to war, who remember fears of bombs falling on San Diego, were upset the newspaper did not pay front-page tribute to the day.
They did not want stories the next day, they wanted stories on the anniversary itself. Feelings were high this year, perhaps intensified because of the controversies surrounding the planned Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay and the atomic bomb postage stamp.
Where was the front-page flag, several callers asked. The American flag appears on the front page on holidays and election days. Pearl Harbor, an important day in U.S. history, is not a legal holiday. No flag.
What unhappy readers really wanted was a front-page story because readers never fail to complain when a flag alone commemorates a holiday. A story on A-15 about a Japanese submarine that may have participated in the attack was not what they had in mind, even if the Union-Tribune’s green street edition had a front-page reference to it.
More than 134,000 veterans of World War II live in San Diego County. Add their families and others old enough to remember the day or events that followed and it is understandable how some may be unhappy that what was a cataclysmic day for many is not noted in a way they deem proper.
