Universalizing the copy desk

Turmoil in the generally placid waters of copyediting! Singleton lets drop that he might outsource their work to India! Weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth! The American Copy Editors Society (ACES) responds (on front page of site, not permalinkable):

Sending copy editing overseas is a sure way to kill a paper's credibility. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not in one dramatic gesture, but every time that desk 9,000 miles away overlooks some nuance that local readers will spot, the newspaper's credibility dies a little. Oak Lawn, Oak Cliff, Oak Park, Oak Hill? What's the diff?

....And let's not even start on the tragicomic workflow disaster an overseas desk would cause. Just think of the last time you had to deal with an overseas customer service call center.

I'm sorry, but I happen to think the world’s offended copy editors are wrong for suggesting, in effect, that those dumb folks in India don’t know English well enough, and won't know their particular backyard, resulting in a ton of stupid mistakes.

The unions’ argument against Singleton (in their formal response) is plainly weak; it boils down to: There might be “errors a local person would have caught.” What else is new? There are plenty of errors already.

But beside that, if you look at the stories in any major Indian newspaper online, you won’t find scads of grammar errors, spelling errors, or stilted language. And for the most part, at the various regionalized copy desks already within MediaNews Group today, they don’t make mistakes about street names and such that are a couple of counties away, because Google has been invented (along with the telephone), to doublecheck those things. Distant copy desks can learn the local particulars pretty quickly and would obviously build themselves a reference manual as well. The California MNG papers are already doing ad production in India, apparently with no surge in errors, and the outfit Singleton probably has in mind, Mindworks, has been at this for a while very very successfully for a number of other major publications.

A better idea than all of this, however, is wiki-based journalism, which I seem to be posting about frequently (click "wikipedia" tag below this post). As part of this, stories could go online before getting excruciatingly edited, and would then go through several cycles of re-editing and annotation, Wikipedia-style, as envisioned by Japan's Information Architects. Copy editing in this model is universalized, as it is at Wikipedia.

Of course, copy editors won’t like that either, because it means that to some extent, Jane Public becomes your copy editor. But what's wrong with that? If Jane Public is already spotting mistakes (or “missed local nuances”) all over the paper today, while there are still copy editors warming American seats, why not let her just fix those mistakes, so reporters and editors can focus on chasing down the rest of the story? In fact, if enough Jacks and Janes out there can be engaged in the process of not only copy editing but researching, reporting and improving stories and news wiki topics, news content could be enormously enriched.

Newspaper as Wiki, by Information Architects

Oliver Reichenstein heads up an outfit in Japan, with an outpost in Switzerland, called Information Architects (iA). Matt Gerber is iA's information designer. They've done a lot of innovative branding work, and a lot of innovative thinking about the future of news, and especially about "newspapers as wikis. " Their entire "about us" reads:

Brands are interfaces. Successful brands perform and evolve in a controlled, interactive process with their audience. Performance empowers the brand.

iA plans, builds, and manages interactive brands by continuously measuring and optimizing the performance of their user interfaces.

iA’s offices in Tokyo and Zürich serve clients from Japan, Germany and Switzerland.

Follow their thinking about news and newspapers in this sequence:

From March 2007, "The Future of News: How to Survive the New Media Shift," an endorsement of the wikipedia approach to news publishing (which I've endorsed, urged and elaborated on previously):

The making of a news article must become a public process. This will greatly increase the quality and the trust in published text. The integration of social media into the writing process is a greatest opportunity for writers and readers since the invention of the press; the more intelligent the readership of a newspaper the more intelligent the product will become.

Wikipedia proves that it works. The only question is: Which newspaper will allow their readers to participate in the writing an editorial process first. Participating means: You let them influence the article from the beginning to the end—and beyond. Future newspapers will allow their readers to influence the article before and after it is published. The only way to do this is by turning the newspaper web sites into transparent public editorial tools.

Also in March 2007, iA posted "10 Newspaper Myths Deconstructed," including:

Myth 10: Newspapers need to become social networks
Fact 10: Newspapers need to become Wikis

Newspaper readers are not friends. Good readers are supposed to be critical about each other and not pat each other’s backs. There is a much more obvious technological model for newspapers.

I believe that newspapers need to make the development of a story transparent, they need to cross link and cross reference articles, they need to allow users to write articles and collectively correct each other’s mistakes and they need to become at least as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Got it? Yes, newspapers should use Wiki technology. There is a lot to improve on the front end, but the content generation and optimization model is an almost perfect fit.

Then in April 2007, hinting that they had a customer interested in the wiki notion, they posted "Washington Post Redesign as a Wiki, " to answer questions beginning with "What does a newspaper as a wiki look like?" (The customer was not the Post.) Have a look at the graphics illustrating their thoughts.

Shortly thereafter appeared "Newspaper Wiki: Schematics," a Q&A on how iA sees the "newspaper as wiki" working. It includes a graphic illustrating a "wiki-based editing process,"

Finally, in June 2008, iA unveiled Newsnetz, which "joins the forces of major Swiss newspapers and a series of local Swiss papers to become the country’s leading news domain in terms of reach, traffic, editorial size, and production." With Newsnetz, they've put into practice their development of the "newspaper as a wiki." Again, look at the post for extensive graphics showing the sites before and after, and how the design was done. The sites themselves are now live, they're Tages Anzeiger, Berner Zeitung, and BazOnline. (Keep in mind that at this point, I believe the wikification is behind the scenes in the content management system, and apparently has not yet reached the stage where readers can join the process. But perhaps a reader of German can explore those sites better than me and explain how the reader might interface with them, wiki-like.)

There's a lot more to digest at iA, including many comments from visitors and responses from iA to the comments. Well worth spending some time with.