Editing and Technology

The University asked me to write a paper on how information technology is helping editors in their managing tasks, such as managing staffs, budgets, routines and procedures. I am going to report what is going on here, but it would be very helpful if I could have four of five lines from you about your point of view/experiences with that. Is it saving time? Has it made easier to "talk" to staffers? Does it improve the qualitiy of your work? I would also thank any suggestions on bibliography. I have tried search engines but haven´t found anything interesting.
AnaAna Estela de Sousa Pinto - Folha de S.Paulo

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From my perspective, technology is usually the enemy of the newsroom. It has the potential to speed tasks and improve creativity, but too often, is does exactly the opposite.
Examples:

1. Deadlines. I'm old enough to remember when computers were first introduced to newsrooms. One of the things we were promised was that the speed and efficiency of computers would allow us to have later deadlines. The opposite occurred. Nearly every paper I know has much EARLIER deadlines because of computers. It happened because, for one thing, the computer made it possible to shift more work into the newsroom. For one thing, we now set the type.
2. Photo transmission. When I started in the business, photos were transmitted over telephone lines. It took many minutes to send a single picture. So, wire services edited pictures rigorously, sending only one or two to illustrate a story. Now, pictures can be sent with lightening speed. Wire services, figuring they are serving members better by giving them more choices, send out a lot more pictures. But I don't know of any papers that have hired more picture editors to look at all this additional material.
3. Color. When I started, the only variables we had to work with in laying out a page were black and white and big and little. Even so, a lot of poorly-trailed (or untrained) layout people managed to produce some God-awful pages. Now we give those same people a color palate to play with. Those who know what they are doing produce some lovely pages, but you've no doubt seen what others have done. I've seen pages with red and green and black and orange and blue and purple. Who dresses that way? The first thing one New England paper did when it got color capability was to print colored bylines!
4. Over editing. Once upon a time, stories were written on copy paper. Editors used pencils. They could cross out a few words, write a few new ones in the margins, move a graph by circling it and drawing an arrow inserting it higher or lower. But that was about it. Make too many marks on the copy paper and the typesetter would be unable to decipher it. A heavy reorganization of the story required the editor to put a fresh piece of paper in his typewriter and re-keyboard the whole thing. As a result, editors on deadline did only what was necessary, and not more. Computers make it way too easy to over-edit, and way too many editors do, moving graphs up and down, substituting their word choices for the writers' throughout, etc. This is a particularly disaster when done by the world's many mediocre editors. As one of my colleagues puts it, a bad carpenter can put up twice as many shoddy buildings if you give him a pneumatic hammer.
5. The e-mail explosion. E-mail is fine to communicate with people outside the paper. It is a disaster inside. People don't talk any more. They e-mail a colleague just a desk or two away -- an astoudingly bad way to conduct business. Worse, they bury one another with useless e-mail. I get a ton of e-mails from people who copy me in on messages I don't need to read, but I don't know I don't need to read them until I do. It is a huge waste of time, enormously inefficient. (A lot of people copy me in on every message they send just to demonstrate how hard they are working.)
6. Voice mail. It is a menace -- the worst thing that ever happened to customer service at newspapers (and most other businesses as well.) I'd rather talk to someone surly than get bounced around a newspaper phone tree. Prediction: the next big thing in customer service will be to get rid of voice mail and hire some people to answer the phones.

Please understand that I am not a Luddite. I love my computer. I love the way it allows me to access information and to write more efficiently. I love the way computers make it possible for my writers to gather and analyze information. I am thrilled by the prospect of inventing new ways to tell stories by fully integrating works with video, audio, still photography and graphics.
But making effective use of technology means controlling it rather than letting it control us. It means training people to use it effectively rather than using it to do things (such as colored bylines) just because we can. It means using it to magnify our strengths and not allowing it to magnify our weaknesses. But too often, in practice, it does more harm than good.
Bruce DeSilva - Associated Press

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I'd like to add a couple of cents' worth to this discussion, because my main area of academic research for some time has been the impact of technology on the newsroom. particularly on editors.
The bottom line is that computer technology has been seen as a good thing in the newsroom but that some types have been greeted with ambivalence. Sometimes some folks like one form of new technology (say, pagination) and others don't; sometimes it's the same people who love it and hate it. And how well things work depends a lot on the front-end and ongoing investment in planning and training. Training has been a major stumbling block since Day 1, and it still is at many shops. It's often the last priority.
Let me offer a few examples based on research I and others have done:

• Pagination: Editors like what it allows them to do and dislike what it's done to them. It allows them to be more creative and flexible in design, and it gives them far more control of page-production than they had before. In some cases, it allows them to get things into the paper that they probably wouldn't have been able to get in before pagination. In some cases, it has enabled elaborate zoning that could never have happened without pagination. There are good things. But editors dislike the fact that it has forced them to become the back shop, even though they accept it as part of the job. Editors find they have to pay far more attention to production, and often that means a tradeoff in the care they can devote to editing -- and particularly headline-writing. The part of the process that can't get short shrift is production because the bottom line is the paper has to come out with everything in its place. What editors seem to have the most problem with is workload increases that result from inadequate staffing in the face of technological change. Elaborate zoning, which is good for the company, often means a significant increase in workload for an already overburdened copy desk
• Digital imaging: pretty much the same impact as pagination, only on photo editors and photographers. They seem to be more accepting of the limitations, possibly because photo has always been a tech-heavy process.

Earlier studies (not mine) of computers in the newsroom tried to examine things such as error rates and satisfaction. The results were kind of ambiguous on the whole, but in general, I'd say, the newsroom welcomed computers for writing. A keyboard might not be as romantic as an old Underwood, but it's lots more efficient.
Computers for editing were received with more ambivalence because editors wound up having to do complicated markup coding and staffing did not keep pace with the extra work. But it made editing a lot easier (I too lived through the changeover from manual typewriters to computers--then called VDTS). Bruce points out that it made overediting possible. That's true, and I'm sure there are excesses, but what computers replaced were technologies that made underediting the norm (OCR was evil, and paper and pencil weren't a lot better).
The real problem, as far as I'm concerned, is cultural. Along with the rest of society, newspapers tend to accept the idea that technological change necessarily means both cost savings and progress. It's been a bias in America for centuries, and there's no reason to expect the news busines to respond any differently. Technologies typically do equal progress, but the potential downsides tend to get buried in the rush to seize the very real upsides. The result in newspapers is a lot of fixing of systems (machine and human) that are broken, rather than planning systems with sufficient staffing and training to keep them from breaking in the first place.
This is what happens at the end of the term--I have too much time on my hands, so I write long.
John Russial - University of Oregon

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While I find most of what you have to say both interesting and useful, John, I'd like to take issue with one point.
You write:
"Bruce points out that it (newsroom computers) made overediting possible. That's true, and I'm sure there are excesses, but what computers replaced were technologies that made underediting the norm (OCR was evil, and paper and pencil weren't a lot better."
I think it's more complicated than that, and that in some ways, for some editors, pencil and paper was a superior technology.
By making it so easy to reorganize and rewrite copy, computers magnify both our strengths and our weaknesses. They make it easier for the best editors to handle copy, but of course that means they also make it easier for poor editors to damage copy. And, more importantly, they make it much too easy for the many editors who think their job is to rewrite.
Overediting isn't just an occasional excess, as you seem to suggest, John.. It is an epidemic that does enormous damage to stories, writers and the proper exercise of the editing function.
For editors who are going about things the wrong way -- and there are a great many of them -- pencil and paper would be better. With pencil and paper, it was very difficult to heavily reorganize or rewrite a story. So, editors tended to do only what was necessary. If a story really needed an extensive rewrite or restucturing, the editors had to kick it back to the writer.
With pencil and paper, editors edited and writers wrote -- which was the way it should be.
Let me also pick one nit. Your note seems to suggest that the standard for whether something is an improvement is whether editors "like" it. I suspect bad editors who have fallen into the rewrite habit "like" their compters just fine.
Bruce DeSilva again

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Here much of the discussion thread veered off into a discussion of the skills good editors need and the ways to train those skills. That discussion is posted separately. Here are some more responses dealing with technology:

Every reporter and editor in our main office and bureaus has a Pentium-class, IBM-compatible computer on their desk. Each PC is running Windows95 and has the following software: Coyote3 (this is what we use to produce the newspaper); Microsoft Office Pro97 (Word, Access and Excel ... PowerPoint is installed only if they need it, most don't); Internet Explorer (Web browser); Acrobat Reader; Real Audio/Real Player; and any other specialty applications people need to do their jobs. For instance, two work stations also have FoxPro and mapping software for advanced data analysis of local public records and Census data.
I would say that probably 90 percent of the people in news (we have 400 employees in this department) use the high-speed access to the Web (T-3 line). Many people have bookmarked the place(s) they like to frequent to do their jobs. Of this 90 percent, most know how to conduct simple searches in search engines to find additional material. Of this 90 percent I'd guess that perhaps 30 percent know how to conduct an intermediate-level search in a search engine (intermediate would be defined as using parentheses or a tag such as "title:" to focus the search...rather than just linking words with the traditional "and" and "or").
Through personal observation over the past year I can say that line/assignment editors utiltize the Web to look at state- and local-level public records such as campaign finance, school test scores, corporate records and sexual preditor listings. So, as a "management" tool, the Web helps them to view original public records data that were previously more difficult to obtain. This helps editors to get more involved than ever before with brainstorming story ideas and interacting with reporters as the story is developing in order to shape ideas for graphics.
Word allows newsroom managers to create and maintain secure personnel reports as individual files can easily be password protected.
I created two separate Excel files to mimick our traditional paper forms for mileage and trip reimbursements. The newsroom auditors LOVE them because now they don't have to redo every math calculation! The news staff LOVE them because the math is automatic and the reimbursement checks are issued faster since the auditors don't have to spend time re-checking every calculation.
The customized Excel files are available on our intranet. I'll be happy to send you a copy of each so you can see first-hand how each works. In both cases, a visual is worth a thousand words!
One of our systems editors for News created a template in Word that looks just like our fancy letterhead. In this way, people in news can generate official looking letters and send the file to a network printer without worrying about having the printer loaded with pre-printed logo paper. Also, the Word template allows each staffer to create customized letterhead -- a feature that would be too costly to do with traditional printed methods. This has been a BIG hit with editors and reporters when responding to the public or placing public records requests.
Debbie Wolfe - St. Petersburg Times

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Debbie knows her newsroom, and is doing great technology training, but in most newsrooms I think those success rates would be inflated.
>Of this 90 percent, most know how to conduct simple searches...
Consider the basic search tool: Yahoo. Everyone knows how to use Yahoo, right? Sure, most know how to search for a word, or even a phrase in quotation marks.
But watch how your staff uses Yahoo. Two examples:

• Very few journalists use the category system at Yahoo, which is the main way it's organized. (Example: Looking for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation but have forgotten its name? Search for "children and diabetes." JDF won't be on the list of hits, but among the hits will be some organizations, along with camps and sugar-free diets and the like. Click on "organizations," which is the tail end of the category name, and you'll find other groups dealing with diabetes and children, including the JDF.) In other words, everything at Yahoo is next to other things; everything is on a shelf. It's like grocery shopping. I don't have to know the name of the salad dressing we use. I just have to be able to find the salad dressing aisle, and know ours when I see it. And, of course, the shelf system allows the serendipity of finding things next to the one you went looking for. But few journalists click on the category.

• Very few journalists recognize when they've been Googled by Yahoo. (Some don't realize that Yahoo is a directory, and Google is a search engine; AP and others continue to use the phrase, "search engines, such as Yahoo." It says right in the help file at Yahoo, "Yahoo is not a search engine.") Yahoo is not a search engine, but it has made a deal with one. When Yahoo fails to find a Web site matching the search terms in its directory, it casts the user out into a Web page search by Google. Yahoo hides this fact, yes, in very small type, at the top of the page. At this point, confronted by a list of Web pages, the worst thing the user can do is to start to plow through the hits. Two better options: (a) realize that one has perhaps missed good sites in Yahoo, so go back and search again with fewer terms and/or broader terms; or (b)if you want to search at Google, go to Google, instead of reading Google results in Yahoo. On the Google site itself, one has better options, such as the "cache" to read the text of pages that have changed or expired or been moved.

Hypothesis: By not having basic standards, we accept our colleagues' assurances that they know how to do more than they do.
Bill Dedman - Power Reporting newsroom training