M&K Consulting Services Inc.
Why Don’t We Edit Wire Copy?
(From a Posting on the American Press Institute
Internet Page, by Kenn Finkel — finkelm@aol.com)
(The American Press Institute in
. . . We do little to no editing here on wire copy, which kind of
sucks! In fact, we even created some sort of time-saving “rule” recently that
we shouldn’t read wire stories at all. . . .
I have to say that’s one of the
most depressing postings that I’ve ever seen in these classes — but,
unfortunately, it’s not all that unusual.
I feel bad for [the seminar
participant], but she’s probably expressing the sentiments of a lot of editors
and managing editors — who have short-sighted bean-counters breathing down
their necks. Is it any wonder that readers are losing confidence in newspapers?
In fact, in an earlier go-round of
this same class, I found this
statement in a posting, which is almost exactly the same thing that [the
seminar participant] said:
. . . the wire stories tend to get
shipped through first and the local stories held up . . . .
I hear this a
lot — in these courses as well as newspapers that I visit for seminars. I have
never understood it. It’s a philosophy that guarantees a loss of credibility. Why should wire copy get less editing than staff copy?
Let’s face it: With staff copy,
you know your source. You know the strengths and weaknesses of your people. You
usually know what you’re getting. With wire copy, you have no idea. You rarely
know who the reporters are or how good they are at what they do.
I have a lot of friends at the
Associated Press, and I don’t want to imply that they don’t do a good job. They
do, and it’s often unappreciated and anonymous. But editing material in our
newspapers is our job — not the job
of wire services.
When we allow wire services to
edit our newspaper, we’re abdicating our responsibility.
Three of the six problems in
Exercise 1 [of the copy editing course] involve wire stories. I have no doubt
that they appeared in the newspapers in which I found them exactly as they
moved on the wire. Sort of, “Oh well. It’s the AP. It
must be OK. We’ll assume that the big questions have been answered — and we’ll
just slap them in.”
One participant in another
previous class reported something like this: “We pay the AP to get it right.
Our management doesn’t feel that we have to question AP copy.”
To which I replied something like:
It’s your newspaper. Your
credibility is at stake. Take copies of your paper into a restaurant in your
city and ask people sitting at the tables there if they can identify staff copy
and differentiate it from wire copy. Guess what? Most readers don’t know the
difference.
More important, they don’t care.
And they shouldn’t. Most readers
don’t even understand terms such as “wire copy” and “staff copy.” And they shouldn’t have to. It’s your paper. Produce it for your readers.
Newspapers that forget the
readers lose credibility fast. But that’s not your fault; it’s the fault of the people who control the purse
strings. When readers question the credibility of your paper, those profits that the bean-counters like
to point to will diminish very soon.
From Kenn Finkel, M&K Consulting
Services. Anyone wanting to use this material in a
public forum should contact Finkel at FinkelM@aol.com .