Saving MediaNews' bacon

Here is a response to MediaNews President Jody Lodovic's comment in Bloomberg about the cost-saving measure of consolidating copy desk editors -- the last line of defense in journalism: "Perhaps Mr. Lodovic was thinking primarily of the Bay Area in California, where MediaNews owns a handful of papers. Surely there, centralizing the copy desk would be a prudent economy."Perhaps not...What it comes down to is an unstated but pervasive belief that quality can be sacrificed without any serious penalty...These papers have to be edited, which is time-consuming and expensive; otherwise, the accumulation of little errors and great ones over time will erode the reliability of the product."That comes from John McIntyre, The Baltimore Sun's assistant managing editor for the copy desk and a past president of the American Copy Editors Society.In other words, copy editors are the ones who "save our bacon" when they're allowed to do their job well.Read the rest of McIntyre’s piece at: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2007/10/just_sack_all_the_editors.html