With staff cuts sweeping across the newspaper industry, one thing you often see in memos and stories accompanying these layoffs and buyouts is a comment from the head honcho that “We’re not losing any reporting positions” or “These changes will allow us to put more boots on the ground”. Such comments try to reassure readers that the newspaper’s staff may be getting smaller, but its quality is not declining because “hey, we’ve got just as many or more people out on the street getting the stories.”

Of course, that crock of BS would only fool outsiders who have no idea how journalism and newspapers work. I’m not surprised that some of those people could be fooled by the “more boots on the ground” line, considering I’ve come across the following kinds of remarks during my journalism career:

• “I don’t like the headline you wrote for your story” (even though I just wrote the story, not the display type).
• What does a newspaper designer do?
• You design pages? Don’t they have computers that can do that?

Unfortunately, newspaper management seems to be buying it own line as it is increasingly leaning toward outsourcing non-reporting duties such as copy editing and page design. Some papers, most notably those owned by Dean Singleton, have already consolidated those duties for multiple papers in the same region. Other papers have significantly reduced the size of their copy and design desks through staff cuts and reshuffling positions. The idea that copy editors are less important in the new media world is even catching support from some quarters because of the decreasing need for pagination as newspapers move online. Having been a writer, a copy editor, and a designer in my newspaper career, I can say from experience that eliminating copy editing and design positions or outsourcing them to anywhere beyond the local community, much less overseas, is a recipe for disaster.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

There’s a reason why most people fresh out of journalism school want to be reporters and few want to be deskers. Reporting is, after all, the “glamorous” part of journalism. You don’t get Pulitzers for doing all the copy editing on an investigative piece. From the community/audience perspective, the reporter is also the face of the newspaper, while most readers have no idea how many people work behind the scene at a newspaper to make the product they get every day — and I’m not just talking about that stack of paper in your driveway every morning. I’m also talking about the stories that show up online, the multimedia packages, etc.

Given the visibility of the reporter position, it’s natural that when cutting staff, newspapers would lean toward preserving those as much as possible, in part because it’s a good PR move. The public knows that fewer reporters = fewer stories, but when it doesn’t even know who or how many people work behind the scene editing copy and designing informative packages, it is less able to equate personnel losses in those areas with decline in quality. However, what newspapers are doing by cutting more desk positions is, in effect, slashing their quality-control department. For all their duties, the most important role that copy editors play is quality control. There will be less of a need for pagination in the new journalism world, but there will be a greater need than ever for quality control, given the 24-7 news cycle, the faster turnarounds, and the influx of information and misinformation that come with online.

Now, imagine if a car maker sent out a press release saying it’s cutting staff, but that by cutting mainly into its quality control department, it has managed to keep as many hands on the factory floor as before and they can turn out as many cars as before. Let’s see: Fewer people making just as many cars as before, with less quality control, and churning out the cars in much less time than before. Does it make you want to rush out and buy one of these cars, or does it make you want to rush out and buy more life insurance?

In terms of design duties, whether you can eliminate/outsource positions depends how you view the role of designers. If you merely view them as smart monkeys who know how to use InDesign to fill up pages with text — and there are legitimate situations where that’s all a company really needs — then you don’t even need to outsource. There are programs that can do that for you. But if you view the visual component as an important part of story-telling and communication, then the quality of your product will invariably decline when you cut or outsource those jobs. But as I’ve said before, it’s amazing how many positions become unnecessary when you remove quality from the equation.

Then there is this practical concern: At many of the papers that are cutting into their copy and design desks but “keeping just as many boots on the ground”, those boots on the ground are often required to double-dip as deskers. At one of my former papers, the sports desk has gone from four full-time copy editors/designers to just one in the span of four years. Every member of the sports department’s writing staff, which has also shrunk, is now required to work desk at least one day a week but must also produce just as many, if not more, stories as they did before. Now, in what kind of bizarro world would such an arrangement not decrease the quality of the work by the “boots on the ground”? Also, having worked at two papers with significantly different staff sizes, I can tell you that having just one or two more copy editors/designers on a section can make a huge difference in how you edit stories. Editing and proofreading are about similar as reading a book is to reading the Cliff’s Notes on the book.

Let the Readers Do It, or Not

There is a notion that, in the oncoming era of online media, where you must incorporate the audience into the news-gathering process, we can outsource some of the quality control to the audience. Yes, I agree the audience can be a valuable resource of information for a story, and they can point out mistakes when they see them, but relying on them to point out your mistakes is a self-inflicted blow to your credibility.

Going back to the car example, how much faith would you have in a car model if the manufacturer said, “We’ve decided to incorporate you, the driver, into our car-making process. From now on, we’re decreasing in-house quality control and outsourcing part of it to you so that we can put more of our personnel toward making the cars. If you find any technical/design flaws with the car you bought, let us know through our nifty online interface and we’ll fix it ASAP.”

Making it easy for me to notify you of an error in your story when I see one is fine, but asking me to serve as your unpaid copy editor as a part of your standard practice is not. Why the heck am I consuming your product if you can’t assure me that YOU are putting in the effort to make it meet a certain quality before it reaches me?

“Buy Local” Applies to News, Too

Outsourcing copy editing positions is almost just as bad as eliminating them. Part of “editing” is deciding whether the story makes sense for your readers, and a big part of what enables a copy editor to do that is the knowledge of the community the newspaper serves, which provides context for the story I’m looking at. As a sports copy editor, I had knowledge of the local prep scene from all the years I had lived in the community, so I know things like when a school is having its best season since 1935 or the team the local school just knocked off is a perennial powerhouse. Or take a non-sports example: If a murder occurs in a neighborhood, a copy editor who lives in the community would know if that’s a pristine neighborhood and such a crime would be shocking to its residents, whereas a copy editor 5,000 miles away would not. That context can impact how you read the story (what kind of things you would regard as must-haves) and the peripherals that round out the story, such as the headline and accompanying stats and graphics. That same knowledge base also plays a key role in my work as a designer: I have to understand the topic from a local perspective in order to figure out what components should be incorporated into the package to make it as informative as possible.

Now, move me just 30 miles away from the community my paper serves, and my knowledge base for that community shrinks significantly. Now move me 5,000 miles away, and my knowledge base would be virtually non-existent. It’s ironic that, even as many decree that “reporters and editors must live in the communities they cover”, they think nothing of shipping the second half of the journalism process — and the part that handles the story last before it is disseminated to the public — to another country.

Put it another way: People love “buying local” when it comes to food nowadays, even if it means paying a bit more. If you don’t want food that’s produced 5,000 miles away, why would you want a local news product that’s produced 5,000 miles away? It’s asinine to think of copy editing and design as something that’s not part of the process of “producing” journalism. It’s like saying the guy making sure the brakepads work isn’t part of the car-making processs. If the duties are performed before the story reaches the consumer, then they are part of the production process. Eliminating and outsourcing them can be just as detrimental as eliminating and outsourcing reporting positions.