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Reader Barry Robertson struck a nerve last week when he wrote to the Post.
Robertson said he was amused that a Post editor had chosen to make a dig in a photo caption at improperly labeled mailboxes (ones that say “The Cook’s” instead of “The Cooks,” for example).
Robertson explained:
“My amusement came from the fact that a grammatical and/or spelling error occurs in practically every edition of the Salisbury Post, thus we have a case of the ‘pot calling the kettle black.’ ”
He went on to theorize about why the Post allows this to continue and talk about how great the Post used to be.
Usually when someone writes me a letter like this I can find a spelling error or two in their scribbling to soften the blow. But Mr. Robertson gave me no such satisfaction. His neatly typed epistle was error-free.
But he also passed along a worthwhile suggestion: Write a column explaining the Post’s proofing procedures. So, here goes.
Three things might alarm Post readers:
- We do not have full-time proofreaders at the Salisbury Post.
- We have never had proofreaders in the 22 years I have worked at the Salisbury Post. I don’t know of any daily paper that does.
- We have always strived for perfection —and always made mistakes.
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Most of the Post’s news and sports pages are put together on the day of publication, between 7:30 and 11:15 a.m.
The afternoon before, copy editors received the pages they were to lay out and started sizing up the space they had. The Advertising Department has already blocked out the space needed for ads; news would fill the rest.
Feature pages can be filled the day before, because features usually are not time sensitive. So can pages carrying court dockets and other record items. But to give readers the latest scores and the freshest news, we wait to fill most news and sports pages on the day of publication.
Few of the stories are ready when copy editors arrive at 7:30 a.m. Stories provided by the Associated Press are available, though they may be updated. But there’s a great deal of local copy to generate in the morning —from obituaries to late-breaking news. Reporters have law enforcement offices to visit, night meetings to write up, interviews to complete, overnight developments to follow up on.
So they do, and they turn in their stories right up until deadline at 10:15 —a time that often gets stretched as the staff pushes to get more fresh, local news in the paper.
Under ideal circumstances —everyone is here, no one is pulling double duty —each local news story gets a first read from the managing editor and a second read from a copy editor. On the more usual, less-than-ideal day, each story gets one thorough read. Depending on the story and the questions that may arise, editing it can take anywhere from two minutes to half an hour.
Copy editors put pages together on a computer screen. They see a miniaturized version of the newspaper page, to which they attach stories, headlines, photos and captions. Fortunately, we can blow up areas of the page to read the stories in something other than miniaturized type.
The editor of a page strives to read every article carefully. But when late news breaks, stories come in late or other problems arise, the level of care varies. Sometimes it comes closer to a glance than a full reading.
Even then, there’s a fall back. The editor of each page prints out a copy of the page and gets someone else to look it over —an editor or reporter or both. If they find mistakes, we fix them before sending the page on to production.
A middle school student who shadowed me for two days recently said the thing that surprised her the most about the Post newsroom was how fanatical we were about mistakes. We printed out page proofs over and over and passed them around. She seemed impressed by our attention to detail.
But there are thousands of details to every page, and some mistakes get by us. Once the last story comes in, we have only a few minutes to get the page out.
There is one more chance to make things right. Once the press starts running, usually around 11:45 a.m., we quickly look over the printed paper to see if there’s anything we must fix. At this point, with subscribers expecting the Post to land in their yards at the usual time, a mistake should be major to justify stopping the press — a person misidentified, a headline misspelled, the end of a story cut off. We stretch that guideline, too. We know that even minor mistakes can be major irritations to readers.
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So, there’s more than anyone would want to know about proofing procedures for the Post’s news department. In a way I lied: Every person in the newsroom is a proofreader. But we all have other, primary duties. No one here spends 40 hours a week poring over pages in pursuit of spelling-and-grammar perfection. You’re more likely to find that at a magazine or book publishing company.
Putting out a daily newspaper is a constant compromise. You do the best you can in the time you have. Period.
The next day, you try again.
I’m proud of the work the Post staff puts into each day’s paper. We have a tight crew of intelligent, skilled and incredibly hardworking people. Each day we send 26,000 copies of our work out into the
community, knowing that what people might remember is the one mistake we missed. They’ll never know about the problems we avoided or fixed, but that comes with the territory.
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Elizabeth G. Cook is editor of the Salisbury Post.
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Elizabeth