hmmm

020 7269 1430

• Communication
• Legal Business
• Real Estate
• Wealth Management

Why We Need Sub-Editors

February 16, 2009

Pity the humble sub-editor (or, if you are in America, copy-editor). The recession has already created a raft of new freelancers, and now here comes Professor Roy Greenslade telling the world that the sub-editor is redundant.

Greenslade, formerly an editor of the Daily Mirror, opines thus: “I write my blog every day, I don’t need a sub to get in the way. I produce copy that goes straight on screen – why can’t anyone else do that? You can eliminate a whole structure. It’s not perfect, not how I would want it to be – but the thing is, commercially, we have to do it.”

Blade is not so sure. He will never forget the words of one hack at the Independent on Sunday, a long time ago when Blade was making the transition from the legal world to the fourth estate. “Trust me,” said the hack, “90% of journalists can’t write.”

Years later, as someone who both edits and writes almost as prolifically as the good professor, Blade fears that those words still ring true. The regrettable fact is that many people whose words assuage or, in Giles Coren’s case last Saturday, inflame a nation over breakfast are to language what Jose Mourinho is to humility. Theirs is an uneasy embrace, one which too often only works because someone else has improved their outpourings. That person is the sub-editor, the unsung hero of the newspaper world, a man or woman (gender is irrelevant) devoted to the “Five Cs”. His mission is to make the copy (i) clear, (ii) correct, (iii) concise, (iv) comprehensible, and (v) consistent. In other words, to make it say what it means, and mean what it says.

Professor Greenslade’s fidelity to the Five Cs is undoubted, so too, however much he dislikes canines, Giles Coren’s. Sadly, however, they are in a minority. A world without sub-editors would not only be confusing, it would also be rather harsh on the eye.

Photo from CounterValue, an excellent source of media analysis written by Justin Williams.