Knight Ridder's (ex)plans for copy editors...and why they sucked.

Before their downfall, Knight Ridder planned to consolidate their copy editors. This plan caused a lot of controversy within the company and media world; it caused enough controversy that David Sullivan, an editor responsible for copy editing at one of KR's largest newspapers, wrote to Romenesko stating:

...Discussions of the plan concerned locating copy editing "hubs" in three cities. While I have no idea why those were selected, I would have to think it was because 1) the work needed to reach across time zones, and 2) one needed to draw talented people, but the company wanted to avoid the cost-of-living (and thus wage) disparities of places like Miami and San Jose, or the union contracts...

While I'm sure that economy and "efficiency," particularly in KR's later, desperate days, were the buzzwords, part of the genesis was the belief of some leaders of KR's news division that the selection of national and international news in some of their smaller papers could be quixotic, depending upon who was assigned to do wire that night. There had been an earlier project to provide a common nat-forn lead page to all the smaller papers.

My understanding was that there would be some copy editors kept at the larger papers, at least, who would handle local copy. The major initial thrust had to do with 33 papers, or whatever number KR owned that week, re-editing the same AP story on, oh, fires on Southern California. There was a recognition that asking someone in Fort Worth to know what a "row office" is in Philadelphia was asking too much, at least initially. Of course, the Internet era has led to increased emphasis on local copy, which would have affected the plan.

Sullivan then noted why this idea sucked.

1. Every paper has a different headline font and caption style. Some papers use subheads. Every paper has a different style for AP credits. Was KR going to have one centralized style for all its papers? If not, then everything has to be rewritten from paper to paper, which is not going to save much work.

2. The Inquirer has its own stylebook and does not always follow AP style. Was this going to be thrown out?

3. How were each plant's bewildering systems of lifts, replates, and makeovers going to be handled? Again, an asterisk in Philadelphia means a diamond somewhere else means...

These are not all gigantic issues in themselves, but throw them all into a pot and it becomes a big pot. It was a bad idea, but if it was going to happen regardless of its being a bad idea, then you had to deal seriously with the operational problems. Every paper has different ad stacks. Every paper has different protocols for handling the dieds page. Every paper uses a different style for graphics. The only real way to achieve efficiencies in production is to produce a largely standardized product from market to market. Most editors wish to retain final control over how their paper looks. If all that was happening was ending up with 95 percent of the same number of copy editors in three locations, because everyone was redoing everything to meet 33 different styles, what was the point? And then there were always issues like, well, in Fort Wayne we own an afternoon paper, and in Philadelphia we own a tabloid...

As a possible future copy editor, I concur.