Posted by It was announced in The New York Times this week that they are doing away with their copy desk staff. I find this to be a sorry state of affairs, because the NYT has been one of the last bastions of journalistic quality in the publishing industry. And even if there appeared to be a somewhat smaller number of ground-breaking stories, at least we knew we could count on never seeing a typo!
The automation of the industry has been escalating for decades, and unfortunately, despite any assurances to the contrary, it has a direct impact on editorial quality as more and more work is delegated to the employees that remain!
I had an interview the other day that felt like déjà vu all over again. One of the leading technology companies in CT has made the switch from being a supplier of office machines to supplying logistics services in the cloud.
They’re using a new content management platform that brings together in one console the ability to create editorial content; design it; incorporate graphic and video elements; optimize it for desktop/laptop/tablet/mobile formats; translate it into multiple languages; and publish it out to a global organization. And this can all be done by one person working at the console.
Publishing in the 1980s
Contrast that with the number of people required to create and publish content back in the 1980s:
- A group of editors and writers would create content;
- A group of copyeditors would edit the content;
- The manuscript would go by human messenger (i.e. via truck or airplane) to a typesetting company;
- Typesetters would enter the manuscript into a computer, which would print out typeset copy on velum paper;
- A copy of this output would go back to the publisher, where the editors, writers and copyeditors would make any necessary corrections to the text;
- A production person would paste the copy of the type onto layout paper, indicating where all the elements of the pages (text, graphics, photos, headlines, etc.) would go;
- The layout was sent back to the typesetter, where the text would be corrected and all the elements would be stripped onto boards and photographed to create a page proof of everything in position;
- The proof would go back to the publisher, where the editors, writers, copyeditors and now also the production people would read the proofs, mark up any corrections and return the page proofs to the typesetter;
- Once these changes were made, the pages would be converted into film and a set of bluelines (proofs of the film) would be returned to the publisher for final correction;
- The film would be corrected and converted into printing plates;
- The publication would be printed, bound and mailed.
Publishing in the 1990s
When the 1990s arrived, Quark Express for the Mac computer became the mainstay of publishers. This made it possible for publishing staff (editors, writers, copyeditors, designers and production people) to actually work together in house to complete steps 1 – 8 amongst themselves before sending anything out. The Quark output could be sent electronically to the printer who would output the film.
Publishing in 2000s
In the 2000s, Quark was used by publishers to go directly to making the digital printing plates at the printers.
Then the publications would be printed, bound and mailed. At that time, the publishing staff required to produce a full-length publication (say, a four-color business magazine of 96 pages) had shrunk down by 90%; and entire departments of mechanical artists, typesetters and platemakers were out of a job all over the country.
The editorial staff that remained had to be very technologically savvy. It wasn’t enough to be able to conceive of content ideas, or to create content, or to copy edit or proofread. Now the editorial job required a person to take the initial concepts and carry them through to the final print stage.
Publishing Today
With the birth of social media, the editorial content paradigm has changed once again. In most cases, there is no printed product anymore. The content creator – either a body of one or a small team – completes the entire online publishing process by themselves. All of steps 1 – 11 above can be performed by one person.
Now, with the new publishing platforms such as the one by mentioned above, not only can the content be created and published by one individual, it can be formatted for all the different media, different languages, and dispatched to multinational offices around the globe.
The world has changed. Work has been automated. Whole industries have been subsumed by technology. And no where is this more apparent than in the content creation and publishing world. I can only hope that the experienced journalists and publishing experts that remain will be here to mentor the younger generation in this new millenium.
All of the Above 