Copy editors don't get no respeck

The 1978 Newspaper Strike Daily News knockoff

   Recently I had occasion to flash back to the Great Newspaper Strike of 1978. I always thought it lasted 78 days, but memory is funny, a google entry pegged it at 84. Whatever. My supervisor at the News at the time, Chuck Slater, got a job as the sports editor of the "interim" Daily Press and brought me along. It was a way smaller staff, if I remember correctly the entire sports department was five or six people, but it might have been less.
   But the thing I remember most about that time was riding in the elevator one day with a couple of colleagues. The Daily Press was in an office building, unlike the Daily News, which had its own Art Deco building on East 42nd Street. There were a couple of secretaries or receptionists in the elevator and one of them asked one of my colleagues if we worked for that newspaper. He said yes, and one of the secretaries said something to the effect of Oh, that must be so exciting.
   At the time she was right. But she might also have said Oh, that must be so depressing, and she also would have been right. Because people who work for newspapers don't work normal hours, which might be called office hours, and if you do that for a certain number of years, like a lifetime, that can be pretty damn depressing. People who work for corporations, of course there are variations, but if you average them out, they come into the office at 9 in the morning and leave the building at 5 p.m. So the elevators are crowded, the subways are mobbed, the lunch lines are long. I often think of the rare time when I was in my twenties and got a weekend off and went to a movie on a Saturday night. The people on line were cursing the lengthy wait to get into the movie. Me, I was loving it, doing something normal on a weekend instead of leaving the office at 11 p.m. and wondering what am I going to do now, then going home and watching old movies on TV until I fell asleep.
   I flashed back to 1978 because the newspaper where I work part time moved last week. It's a pretty old newspaper, and once had its own building in town with its own presses. Then it moved into a four-story building a couple of blocks away that it shared with an engineering firm, the newspaper on the fourth floor and the engineers on the second and third floors, until the engineering firm went out of business and the second and third floors were vacant. But it was still basically a newspaper building. No corporate nine to five types coming and going. Some departments of the newspaper left at five like normal people but they had relatively normal jobs, selling advertising, secretarial positions, things like that, and because the main office was right by the elevator and the newsroom was around a corner and down a hall, their five o'clock departure wasn't very noticeable.
   Last week, the newspaper moved again, into a modern three-story office building, modern at least for the town, which hasn't seen any significant new office construction in about a decade. The main tenant in the building is a mortgage company, which is one of the more prominent members of the town's Chamber of Commerce. Before the move there was a tour of the new office, which I didn't go on, but my colleagues were raving about the breakroom, which they said had three or four of those single serve Keurig coffee things and vending machines and tables, they said it was really cool.
   The actual move was less traumatic than anticipated, and the staff's lone IT guy not only didn't have a nervous breakdown but is probably weighing offers from Marvel to star in its next movie.
   We've been in the new offices for a week now.
   My first day there is when I flashed back to the "interim" paper of 1978 because this was very much a corporate building. The newspaper is on the third floor, along with the mortgage company. On the first floor there's a cardiology practice, which explains why the fifteen to twenty handicapped parking spaces outside the building were all full when I showed up at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday for my first shift in the new building; and a probate court (the building is right next to the Superior Court building); I don't know which tenants are on the second floor, except one of them is a lawyer with an LLC after his name.
   When I arrived, the large parking lot was almost full, meaning I had to park out in what I used to affectionately refer to as god's country. On the other hand, walking is good for you so I shouldn't complain.
   Then five o'clock came around. I was busy editing copy and laying out pages, so I didn't notice the exodus, which, I should add, included a large portion of the newspaper's staff. But when I looked out the window, there were only a few cars left in the parking lot, so far off you could hardly see them.
   And that fantastic, luxurious breakroom? I paid it a quick visit and there were indeed a lot of coffee pots, it would be a great place to have AA meetings on weekends, except I don't think they use Keurigs at AA. And then the word came down from our nice neighbor the mortgage company: No one from the newspaper was to enter the breakroom after 4:30 p.m. This was very bad news for my copy editing neighbor to the right, who is a diabetic with a two can of Diet Coke and a pack or two of chips from the vending machine a night habit. The news meeting ran late a day or two ago and he glanced at his watch and said he hoped the meeting would end by 4:30. It ended at 4:45.
   The next harsh reminder that copy editors don't live normal lives came at sundown. At the former building, staffers parked in a large municipal garage about a block from the paper. The town's infrastructure never quite caught up to its municipal garage capacity, so that while there weren't many cars in the garage when people left work at 11 p.m., they didn't have to go to the fourth or fifth floor to find their car.
   At the new building, come 5 o'clock the parking lot empties out except for the handful of reporters and editors whose cars are in the farther reaches of the lot. And as the sun goes down, the lights that are spread in rows throughout the lot don't come on. It's pretty eerie looking out at the empty lot with the shadows of a couple of cars way off in the distance, or a single car parked in a far corner of the lot. And on a moonless night, the parking lot is pitch dark. Sure, it costs money to turn on the lights, but did anyone consider this when hammering out the terms of the lease? Just like the availability of the break room, another reminder that copy editors and reporters are second class citizens, although reporters at least get out of the office once in a while.
   The other night, after a few days in the new office, the colleague to my left began getting a headache near the end of the shift. His eyes were bothering him, too. So he asked Mr. Google "What is the proper distance from a computer screen for your eyes?" The answer came back 18 to 20 inches. The new desks are very narrow, whereas our former desks were pretty wide, with drawers even, never mind that an occasional mouse liked to forage in those drawers for the occasional stray piece of Halloween candy, but I digress. So he got out his Stanley tape measure -- the office is located in New Britain, after all, birthplace of Stanley Tools and still home to Stanley Black & Decker -- and counted nine inches from his nose to the screen. Then he wheeled his chair back so that his nose was approximately 18 inches from the screen, only to discover that he couldn't reach his mouse. So, like Humphrey Bogart in "The African Queen," when he emerges with numerous leeches on his body and Katharine Hepburn has to burn them off with a cigarette, then after the Queen gets stalled again, right back into the river he goes, so went my colleague's nose back to nine or ten inches from his monitor.
   I was lucky in that I got laid off in 2008 before the Bergen Record moved from the spacious "Record building" to new, smaller headquarters in a corporate building in another town, which they had to do because the presses that took up the whole first floor of the Record building were no longer used and the staff which once filled the fourth floor was decimated.
   I wouldn't call it post traumatic stress because there's nothing particularly traumatic about such a move, but flashbacks are flashbacks, and I'm very much not liking this move because it's served as a glaring reminder of how far from a normal career my career as a newspaper copy editor has been. On the other hand, I'm still a couple of balloons short of throwing a pity party.

Miles to go before I get pulled over



You are now entering ... Aaron's blog





   I've been fired, I've quit, I've been downsized, restructured, laid off, yelled at, cursed, thanked, congratulated, transferred sideways so many times you'd think I was on a merry go round. In 46 years in the newspaper business since I landed a part time job as a copyboy at the New York Post when I was 17 years old and a freshman at the City College of New York, I've sharpened pencils, made coffee, distributed galley proofs, read upside down, written headlines, corrected grammar, saved countless reporters from getting their pants sued off, gotten one newspaper's pants sued off (they should have fought but it was cheaper to settle), hell, it's like preventing terrorism, only the ones that slip through the security measures get noticed. I've Hemingwayed a thousand run-on sentences, called hundreds of reporters in the middle of the night to tell them there's a hole in their story big enough to bounce a beachball through. Did I mention I've made up a verb or two along the way and mangled the English language in a thousand different headlines? There's one thing I've never done until this week ... retired.

   Make that semi-retired. That's the way I see it. Bad financial judgment over the years led me to put in for early Social Security at the age of 63 and for every buck I earn above a certain amount I have to pay a penalty, so I decided to cut back on my hours. I was sure the publisher of the newspaper I work for would take it hard, since I did everything I could the last two and a half years to make myself indispensible, but when I asked to cut back on my hours his eyes lit up. The paper isn't going to replace me, will no longer be saddled with the cost of my health insurance, and my colleagues will have to pick up the slack, so why shouldn't he be happy.

   He's happy. I'm happy. If a day or two of overtime gets thrown into the mix my colleagues will be happy. What's wrong with this picture? I'll tell you what's wrong. If I don't do something to head it off at the pass, my friend Victor is going to send me a comment saying "Congratulations on your retirement." And I'm going to have to correct him and say "Semi-retirement."

   The fact is, it's time to devote more time to my second career as the second coming of Studs Turkel. And to collect my thoughts on the fine art of writing headlines and finish that semi instructional, semi autobiographical book I always wanted to write under the title of this blog. Uh oh. I think I hear the dinner bell tolling. It's tolling for me. I toll you so.

   Toity.

  

  

 

Kudos all around to my colleagues

   A little more than four years after being unceremoniously (acrimoniously might be a better word) dumped by my employer of 20 years, the newspaper that rescued me from the discard bin of long term unemployment, the Bristol Press, was named Newspaper of the Year in its circulation category for 2012 by the New England Newspaper and Press Association. Its circulation may be smaller than that of my previous employer, but its staff is way more enthusiastic and talented, its management much more concerned with putting out a good product than the vast array of deadwood at the paper where I used to work.

   My contribution to the award winning product was marginal, a few headlines here and some page layouts there, dividing my time between the Press and its sister paper, the New Britain Herald, but I'm proud to have contributed even in some small way to the paper's achievement.

What copy editors have in common with tuna fish

   In the year and a half since I was rescued from the discard heap of unemployment by the New Britain Herald, I've noticed that some of my colleagues who are half my age (but they're catching up ... in twelve years they'll be three quarters of my age, but don't quote me on that, I was never good at math), and even some of my contemporaries, have just a little bit of difficulty in the placement of commas. For those more advanced in years it's a little late to try and effect a change since, like me, they'll be voluntarily out to pasture in the next few years, and with the younger crew, there's no one there to correct the results of their college professors' neglect.
   That said, I've been noticing more and more simple grammatical errors on the Internet, where you'd think that the people posting the news would at least have a college education.
   Cut to the chase: The following paragraph was on the Yahoo main news page, and is likely a transcript of a video of Christiane Amanpour bemoaning the inevitable demise of the world's tuna population because we eat too much sushi.

      "Sushi: The Global Catch, a new film from documentarian Mark Hall takes an in depth look at how the growth of the international sushi industry, which exploded in America in the 1980's, has lead to a dramatic depletion of our oceans fish supply. Hall was inspired to make the film when he witnessed the popularity of Sushi in Eastern Europe during a trip to Warsaw, Poland, and was amazed at how fast sushi's popularity has spread."

   The above paragraph is missing a comma, misspells "led" and neglects to make "oceans" possessive, although they're not going to possess much anyway if we keep eating sushi. And perhaps I'm rushing to judgment in concluding that the craft of copy editing is headed in the same direction as the world's supply of tuna ... Hello? My order from Sushi Heaven is here? Thank you, I'll be right down ... Excuse me. After all, I might be overlooking the possibility that the transcription of Ms. Amanpour's video might have been done by voice recognition software, in which case, not bad at all. ... Hello, Sushi Heaven? You forgot to send an eggroll with my bluefin tuna and wild sockeye salmon platter ... What? You don't make eggrolls, but you'll be happy to send a miso soup? Put a sockeye in it.

Recycled Ridiculousness

#!):?(ing Labels

Rumor has it that my former employer, the Herald Record of Woodland Park, N.J., has banned colon headlines. Read that, "Editor to copy desk: No more colons," only, as was always the case at my former place of employ, the editor himself or herself was always too much of a wuss to throw down such an edict him-or-herself, so, according to rumor, the order was barked in the form of a memo from an intermediary, something to the effect of "Let's not write headlines with colons in them anymore."

As I've mentioned previously, at one time or another I've seen just about everything you can put in a headline banned except spoons. And personally, I'd like to ban spoons. The kind used by headline writers who write things like "Performance stirs emotions," or "Election result stirs anger." Such headline spooning should be restricted to the food section. "Chef stirs pot," now there's a headline that makes sense.

During a recent discussion of the alack and alas rumored to be doomed colons, I pondered an accomplishment which at the time I deemed to be virtually impossible. If I were still chained to a copy desk, I opined, I'd love someday to write a single headline that included not only a colon but an exclamation point, a question mark, a parenthesis or two, and, of course, it couldn't be a normal straight headline but would have to be a gerund.

Then it dawned on me. Only I daresay in the above headline I cheated a bit by using a faux gerund, as it were. And it isn't a cliche, unless you consider a string of punctuation marks in place of an expletive to be a cliche.

I can see debating whether a colon should be used to place the attribution at the beginning or the end of a headline, as in "Report: Newspaper business at death's doorstep" vs. "Newspaper business at death's doorstep: Report."

But banning colons entirely? If the New York Daily News had banned colon headlines many years ago, the great headline writer Joe Percival might never have been able to write, on a story about a woman who advertised her colon-cleansing services in the back of New York magazine being arrested when one of her clients turned up dead, a headline that read: "Public enema Number 1." On the other hand, I guess he still could have written that, unless some editor banned colons from stories as well.

Disparate housewives

It's apple picking season and I heard on the radio yesterday that Jim Willse -- the reporter pronounced his name without the noisy "e" at the end, so it came out Jim Wills, although she corrected the pronunciation later in the day -- is retiring. Which reminded me of a story.

It was during the Holidays, as usual I forget which year but I was still in the sports department of the Daily News which makes it early 1980s, and Willse was the new managing editor, or editor, at the News.

When I joined the News, the mantra throughout the newsroom went something like: Your typical reader is a housewife in Queens. Maybe I was a little too slow to change, and maybe the housewife in Queens eventually became a desperate housewife, but with the arrival of Willse, that mantra went out the window.

In typical Daily News fashion, the paper broke an important New York story with an exclusive about how a city official owned a piece of property for which he managed to gain tax-exempt status. Only problem was the tenant on that property was a bar called the Mine Shaft, and you can guess the type of clientele it entertained. So far so good, breaking stories like this is what the News was famous for.

But then, there was the big page one headline, in two or three or six hundred point type, screaming "How the city got shafted."

I don't know about the housewife in Queens, but I was offended by the use of such a euphemism. It was absolutely the same as saying "How the city got f----d." But if the headline said that, the New York Post headline the next day might be: "Readers to Daily News: Drop dead." So "shafted" it was.

My reaction was, "What do the editors think, the housewife in Queens is stupid?"

Today a headline like that wouldn't raise eyebrows. But it rattled my thoughts about headline writing. Was I now supposed to write crap like that?

A few days after this, the News had its Christmas party. Like I said, this was in the 1980s, before newspapers began using the euphemism "Holiday party" instead of Christmas party. And if you think the state of the newspaper economy sucks today, things were so bad then that the paper started charging its own employees -- $10, I think it was -- to attend the Christmas party!

So there I was at the Christmas party, and who should I see off in the distance but this new editor guy Willse, surrounded by the usual gaggle of sycophants who suck up to any new big shot at any large paper. I worked my way through the crowd, which was kind of sparse to begin with, and introduced myself to Willse. Then I asked him if he didn't see anything wrong with using a headline like "How the city got shafted"?

"Not at all," he said, or words to that effect. "It's a pretty good pun."

Don't you think?

No I don't.

I'd heard all I needed to hear. This man was clueless. Although, now that I think of it these many years later, his previous job was in San Francisco, so maybe, rather than attempting to move the News' headlines in a provocative new direction, he was simply motivated by his experiences in a different cultural milieu. Maybe he wasn't a fraud after all.

It didn't take long for the new order to take root. Copy editors who'd been trying to sneak suggestive headlines past the slot for years saw the floodgates thrown open. I was still in the sports department at the time, so how risque could you get? Then one night the New Jersey Nets lost their umpteenth game in a row away from home, and the night sports editor -- nobody had to sneak anything past him, since he wrote it himself -- penned a big back page headline that went: "ROAD APPLES."

Now, me being a city boy, I had to ask someone what a road apple was, and when I got the answer, I was appalled. I said to the person who wrote it, "You can't write that."

His response: Why not? If the city can get shafted, the Nets can lay road apples just like horses do. Or words to that effect.

And that, for me, is the connection between one road apple and another.

From Inca Dinka Do to Rinka Dinka Do

The best headline writer I ever knew was the late Hal Frankel at the New York Daily News. Hal was in his sixties but had never grown up, he was a roly poly over-aged kid at heart. He was a throwback to the days when the language in articles was more colorful and varied than it is today, when people opined instead of said. Hal needed to lose a few dozen pounds, had trouble with his legs, lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Houston Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and took a taxi to and from work each day, probably spending as much in transportation as copy editors make at smaller papers throughout the country but the Daily News paid pretty well and there was no way his legs would carry him down into the subway and up again.

Every day during our "lunch" break, usually around 7 p.m., Hal would go to a nearby watering hole and return with a coffee cup that he'd sip from for the next three hours, only it wasn't coffee that was in the cup. His eyesight wasn't very good, he needed a cataract operation, and he would sit at his terminal with two pairs of glasses, one atop the other, and his head about five inches from the screen. Len Valenti, the copy chief, knew that the copy Hal handled would need a second read, but the headlines Hal wrote couldn't be matched.

He also smoked, and heavily. Back when it was permissible to smoke in the newsroom, his keyboard was like an ashtray, and his fellow copy editors shunned the idea of sitting next to him; except for me. I loved sitting next to Hal because along with the secondhand smoke I thought perhaps by the very same osmosis I might learn something about writing headlines.

When the New York Giants won the Super Bowl in 1987, the team planned a big celebration at Giants Stadium after their return to New York. Each of the 50,000 or so people who attended was given a kazoo; why I can't recall but the idea, I suppose, was to help them make noise. The story about the party went across two of the News' tabloid pages, I don't recall whether it was Pages 2 and 3 or 4 and 5, but the idea was to have a big ol' headline, don't ask me if it was 80 point or 120 point, that spread across the two pages.

Hal's headline for that story was "Start spreading kazoos."

I can only remember one other headline Hal wrote. The anniversary of Earth Day was approaching -- memory being funny, I always thought it was the 25th, but that would have occurred after I left the Daily News, so it most likely was the 15th -- and there was going to be a "harmonic convergence" in Central Park. This was some kind of ceremony going back to the Inca culture. The headline Hal wrote was "Inca Dinka Do." Of the 40 or so copy chiefs I've worked under -- someday I'll have to make an accurate count -- I'd say 30 would have rejected that headline for one reason or other, the most likely reason being a deficiency in the sense of humor department, but the headline got into the paper.

Hal missed a lot of time his last few years at the paper due to health concerns -- he had the cataract surgery, and started taking some kind of medicine that made him stop drinking -- but the damage was done and his liver just gave out the Thanksgiving weekend after I left the paper in 1988.

I always thought it was after he died, but it must have been while he was on sick leave that the News ran a story about how Donald Trump was going to come to the rescue of the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park, which had fallen into disrepair. One of the other copy editors, I think it was Jonathan Kaufman but I can't be sure, in tribute to Hal wrote the following headline: "Rinka Dinka Do."

Now this is something copy editors probably shouldn't do except in the most poignant of circumstances, and that's write a headline that has meaning to your fellow co-workers but would lack that special message to the paper's 1.2 million readers in the case of the Daily News. Still, it's always meant a lot to me.

Thanks for reading.

Iron Curtain falls, lands on copy editor's toe

Headlines. Everywhere you look, newspapers, magazines, books -- okay, there they're called "titles," but a headline by any other name etc. -- Google ads, blogs, social networking sites -- often the first thing you see is a headline. Graphic whizbangs might dispute that, oh no, the first thing the eye goes to is the picture, the bigger and more dramatic the better, and maybe they have a point, but the point is debatable, and here's my side of the debate: Look for instructions on how to create enticing graphics, and the first thing you see is: "How to create enticing graphics." Besides, there are textbooks, web sites, expensive software, freeware, tutorials, but look for a tutorial or software package on how to write headlines and you may come up with the first blank page in the history of Google. Tempted as I am to check that out, I'm not going to, as I'm sure there are some tutorials and copy editing forums that deal with the art of writing headlines.

It's been my experience in the newspaper business that if you give the same story to a dozen copy editors, in most cases you'll come up with nine or ten different headlines. On some occasions a headline will virtually write itself, say, when a customer goes into a Taco Bell and finds a chihuaha in his stuffed burrito, four out of five copy editors might write "Man bites dog," whereas the fifth copy editor would say "Oh, the poor dog, how can you make fun of a situation like that?" and spend half an hour trying to come up with something tasteful, or at least better tasting than a chihuaha smothered in refried beans.

I'd like to say you'll learn something about headlines here, and you will, but some of my favorite headlines have gotten the people who wrote them, including me, in hot water with their supervisors. Good headline writing is risky business, and entertaining the reader and giving giving him or her a reason to read a story that shouldn't merit a second glance might not be worth facing the wrath of a supervisor.

Case in point: When I was working at the New York Daily News, which had some of the greatest headline writers in the world, there was a woman on the copy desk who was a Russian emigre. Her name was Mila, and she was in her mid to late forties. One day she was given a restaurant review to edit. Copy desk chiefs like to parcel out stories to editors who might have a bit of expertise in certain fields, and the restaurant served Russian food and was named Caucasus. Mila edited the review and the headline in the paper the next day read: "Ve vas hungry, Soviet." Only a Russian emigre could come up with that. If you asked me what was my favorite all-time headline, that's the one I would point to. The next day, Mila got called into the copy desk chief's office and got her head handed to her, so to speak. The headline had nothing to do with the quality of the food or the service of the restaurant, the copy desk chief blurted.

"But it made people read the review," Mila argued.

And it made me laugh.

Here I should make a note about newsroom dynamics. This very same copy desk chief read the headline and pushed the button sending it to the typesetter, which means he either approved of it or trusted Mila's judgment sufficiently to know that, pressed for time as copy desk chiefs are, he wouldn't have to analyze the story to determine the appropriateness of the headline. So here's what happened, to borrow a line from my favorite obsessive compulsive detective: The restaurant owner complained to the advertising salesperson that the headline was inaccurate, and the advertising salesperson complained to the publisher, and the publisher sent a tearsheet to the managing editor with the headline circled and a scrawled note saying "How did this happen?" And the managing editor put the tearsheet in an interoffice envelope addressed to the copy desk chief, and the next thing Mila was in tears as she left his office.

There's another lesson in that headline. This is just my opinion. That headline was written so long ago that the Soviet Union was still in existence. I left the Daily News in 1988, the headline was written a few years earlier, and the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Newspaper publishers are streaming crocodile tears these days that younger readers can't relate to them, and if Mila were to write that headline today, she should factor in the possibility that a substantial number of readers wouldn't know what the Soviet Union was, and so their reaction to such a headline might be "Huh?" instead of "ha!" I mentioned earlier that occasionally a headline will write itself. There was one such story recently, in which Bob Dylan was in Asbury Park for a concert, went for a walk late in the evening, and was stopped by two young police officers. He told them who he was and they'd never heard of him, so they walked him back to his hotel and the story became national news. Just about every headline I saw, in newspapers, online, or heard on the radio, went something like "How does it feel?"

I wouldn't have written that, because I believe there are many readers, of newspapers and web sites, who've heard of Bob Dylan but wouldn't identify "How does it feel" as a line from his anthem "Like a Rolling Stone." At an earlier stage of my alleged career I would have written that headline in a heartbeat, but hearing and seeing it in 2009 my reaction was that today's headlines are being crafted and edited by a bunch of fogeys who want to show off how much they know about culture with virtually no sensitivity to the youth of today whose readership they want to attract. Result: While 90 percent of copy editors probably wrote "How does it feel?" I likely would have spent twenty minutes trying to come up with something more identifiable to today's audience.

I should be on the fence about that, but I'm not. And why? Because my instincts tell me I'm right, and a good headline writer will learn to trust his or her instincts.

Thanks for reading.