You need to read this

For those of you in the newspaper business who don't already read Tim Porter, make an effort to get to this post.

Porter has been reviewing Philip Meyer's "The Vanishing Newspaper," chapter by chapter. He gets to Chapter 8 today, and it hits home.

It's on copy editors.

Meyer helped design a survey of copy editors at 169 U.S. papers and found out what we all know: Copy editors are discouraged. Meyer wrote:

"They felt less respected by their newspapers' reporters, they saw fewer opportunities for professional development, they liked their bosses less, and there were less likely to feel reward for their work."

That much we all know. But what's interesting here is that Meyer looked to see whether copy editor happiness and skill on mechanics translate into better circulation. Porter summarizes:

Yes, because Meyer finds a correlation between the way copy editors feel about their work and success in the marketplace. Newspapers where respect for the rim is higher "hung on to an additional 1.5 percentage points of home county penetration" for the three-year period Meyer examined. That "half percentage point a year adds up mighty fast," says Meyer.

What doesn't matter, though, to readership or much else, is how well copy editors do their jobs - at least the part of their jobs that involves ensuring accurate and grammatical copy ends up in the newspaper.

Meyer dove into the databases of 20 newspapers and searched eight years of stories for common spelling and grammatical errors, such as "miniscule for minuscule" and "general consensus for consensus."

The result? Plenty of errors, about 4 percent on average. The San Jose Mercury News published the cleanest copy (1.14 percent errors), the Boulder Daily Camera the dirtiest (11.08 percent).

Big papers were generally more correct than smaller ones, a condition Meyer attributes to staff size: More editors, more time per story, fewer gremlins.

Big papers were generally more correct than smaller ones, a condition Meyer attributes to staff size: More editors, more time per story, fewer gremlins.

But, regardless of where the copy fell on Meyer's accuracy scale it didn't affect any of the other indicators he examines for sign of connectivity between quality and success. He writes:

"If editing accuracy is an indicator of general newspaper quality, then it should predict all sorts of things, including reporting accuracy, credibility, circulation penetration and robustness. It doesn't. Whatever readers want in a newspaper, spelling accuracy appears not to be a primary concern."

Porter addresses the fact that we're not going to like that result. And, no, I don't.

But what does this mean? That there shouldn't be copy editors? I don't think so. I think it means that copy editors need to consider that the really important stuff we're doing is more substantive than grammar and style.

We need to start thinking about how that affects the type of editors we hire (critical thinkers vs. wordsmiths) and the type of training we get.

Let's start asking these big-picture questions. Porter offers us a starting point:

Should there even be a copy desk? The traditional rim is now overburdened with duties ranging from gate-keeping the copy to wrangling the pagination system. Let's separate the manufacturing jobs from the journalism jobs.

Why bother chasing typos and proofing pages? Getting the content right counts, ... but type lice don't bother readers or move the circulation needle, says Meyer, so why put much energy into eliminating them? Doesn't it just reinforce the perfection-minded culture in newsrooms - much effort on little things, little effort on big things?

These are big questions. Any takers?