People of San Angelo,
You might have missed this newspaper story:
CORPUS CHRISTI — The Caller-Times announced a reorganization Thursday that will make it the regional copy editing and page design center for four Texas newspapers. The reorganization included layoffs for 19 Caller-Times employees.
The regional center will house the copy editing and design for the Caller-Times, the Wichita Falls Times-Record News, the Abilene Reporter-News and the San Angelo Standard Times, all owned by E.W. Scripps Co. The copy editing and page design desk center is responsible for the final editing, headlines and visual appearance of the newspapers. The center will be staffed by members from all four newspapers.
“This consolidated desk creates a regional hub here in Corpus Christi,” President and Publisher Patrick Birmingham said. “As we look to find efficient ways to produce the newspaper, this was an idea we felt would help us achieve efficiencies and give us another way to continue putting as many resources as possible into generating local news content.”
You might have missed it because it did not run in the Standard-Times.
What is happening here is that the copy desk at the Standard-Times is, in effect, being shut down before the end of the summer.
If you are not familiar with the copy desk, you are not alone. These men and women are the "proofreaders." They are the people who edit what the reporters write, place stories on the page and write headlines and photo captions. It is a near-invisible job — they work nights and they work weekends. They don't see the public like the reporters do, they are instead fixed to their desks, only sometimes venturing out to Fuentes for a dinner run or to Blaine's Pub after work.
But they provide a crucial service. They are the last line of defense against mistakes. They keep watch over the news wires and scramble to make adjustments when news happens. And, as you can imagine, when you are looking for mistakes in stories about San Angelo and the Concho Valley or you are looking for ways to better inform San Angelo and the Concho Valley … well, it's pretty important to know about San Angelo and the Concho Valley.
Now Scripps Howard is outsourcing this job to Corpus Christi, 6 hours away. (Same goes for Abilene and Wichita Falls — which is about as close to Corpus as it is to Omaha.)
The Corpus Christi story talks big about journalism and local news and efficiency, but it's about the money, of course. Scripps continues to sacrifice everything to save another dime, never mind that they are doing ever more harm to the newspaper they are trying to get people to buy and to advertise in. Go ahead and ask why they ran the story in the Caller-Times, but haven't mentioned it in the Standard-Times.
By this summer, the men and women editing and designing your newspaper will not live in the Concho Valley. They won't be eating at Fuentes or shopping downtown. They won't know Beauregard Avenue from Sherwood Way.
How important is it that a local copy editor work on local stories? You might notice that the Corpus Christi story above spells the name of your newspaper wrong. They left out the hyphen in "Standard-Times." A small detail, yes, but you would expect them, at least, to get the name of the paper right. Small details can turn into big errors.
Imagine that the person editing that local story won't know to keep spellcheck from turning "Eola" into "Ebola." That person also won't know it's of particular interest to San Angelo when a story about Los Lonely Boys comes across the wire.
A local copy editor would know that a story talking about a southbound lane on Koenigheim Street had a problem, they would know that it's a one-way, northbound street. A copy editor in Corpus Christi? Not a clue.
It's true, I'm not an impartial observer. I was a copy editor in San Angelo from 1993-1996 and turned down opportunities at much larger newspapers to come back and be news editor, in charge of the copy desk, from 1999 until 2002. During that later time frame I also wrote about music for the S-T.
My career and my personal life sent me to Austin, but there's no doubt that I loved San Angelo and I loved working for the Standard-Times. In Corpus? At first, there might be an emphasis to do right by San Angelo, Abilene and Wichita Falls. But after a little staff turnover and after the attention from the Scripps bigwigs dies down, trust me, the people in Corpus aren't going to care at all about some little town 6 hours away. They are going to view it as the junior varsity, so to speak. Working on San Angelo stories is going to be a chore that they are going to resent doing.
The executives might tell a more encouraging story. The publishers and top editors might promise otherwise. But I know better. This move will be a huge loss for the people of San Angelo. It's the penultimate step to not even having a newspaper anymore. Only a handful of reporters, sportswriters and columnists stand between what's left and the end of what was once the pride of West Texas.
It's a damn shame. And I thought you ought to know the truth.
Dave Thomas
Amen, brother.
Posted by: Lee Nichols | March 31, 2009 at 05:02 PM