As a stringer, do I have the right to complain about copy editors?

i'll take it for granted the answer is A.

 

When I'm on desk, and I have to cut 2-3 inches from a story, I will almost always (time permitting) call the writer, explain the situation, and see if there's any entire section he/she wants to lose. That way, maybe they can work it into another story en masse, instead of me picking and choosing and taking out a quote here or a paragraph there.

That failing, I will already have some idea, and I'll run that by them as well. "Well, why don't we paraphrase this part, and take this part out?"

Solves nearly all problems, because the writer has some say in what happens.

That, of course, is time-driven.

 

Do you have a right to complain? Not really.
Do you have a right to ask - without being a dick - for an explanation? Sure.

This thread is a great example of why everybody should do desk work at one point or another. There's a lot to be learned from seeing how the other half works. It's an eye opening experience, one that leads me to drink several tall, refreshing glasses of STFU in most instances when my "award-winning" copy is trimmed or rewritten.

To summarize: Quit being such pansies. It's going to happen. Most of us aren't Gary Smith and damn sure not good enough to work at the Plain Dealer.

 

At my paper, I'm dealing with both paid stringers and parents who send in write-ups of youth sports. In both cases, most of them are not professional writers by trade. I tend not to get a lot of complaints from the stringers, but I do get quite a few from the volunteer youth parents.
My first year on the job, one guy wanted me to give my word that I would run his sixth-grade basketball story in its entirety.
Last spring, somebody was upset because I took out the statement that a certain kid was one of the best seventh-grade basketball players in the state. There was nothing in the piece to back it up, just the assertion that he was one of the best in the state. With hundreds, maybe thousands of seventh-graders playing basketball in the state, how did the writer know where this kid stood? I didn't see it in the piece, so that statement didn't see the light of day. Oddly enough, the person who called about it wasn't the person who wrote it, it was the superstar's parent. It seems a lot of youth copy gets peer-reviewed before I get to see it.
Folks, I wish there were a nicer way to put it, but if you need me to promise that I won't change anything you send me, don't write for me.
With the right to edit comes the responsibility to edit competently, however. I've made editing mistakes, too. But sometimes whether or not what I've done is a mistake is a matter of opinion.

 

IJAG, that is time that, frankly, I don't have.

The job is multi-fold: To make copy better, or at the very least, not make it worse; to make it aesthetically pleasing; and, to make it on time. Calling a writer each time I have to slice an inch off a story is not covering any of those missions.

 

I weighed in not long ago, but I'm still amazed that all this hullabaloo centers around a couple inches being trimmed here and there.

I understand getting miffed about a lead change.

I understand calling a reporter, as time warrants, to discuss major changes, but two, three, four freakin inches?

We're talking less than 100 words. I'd guess most stories need that sort of trim to be truly effective anyway.

 

I didn't take the time to read all the posts, but my answer would be, no you don't have the right to complain about copy editors as a stringer. Or the better answer might be that it's likely not going to do any good.

I was a regular stringer for a major daily for a while and stuff got changed all the time. When stuff is right and it gets changed to wrong - which happened a couple times - mention it to the person you directly deal with. But, I learned through the experience that there are copy editors who feel they have to have their fingerprints on a story. I had a lot of stories that the words were changed. Not the meaning, but the word. Ex: If I wrote, "The Giants have fast receivers," they'd change it to "The Giants have speedy receivers." No need to change what I wrote, but they'd do it just to do it. I also had many occassiosn where I was told to write 13-14 inches on a prep game, and it would be about 9-10 inches in the paper. It sucks, but there's nothing you can do about it. I had to realize that they probably weren't cutting my story because it sucked. They were just trimming it to fit it in the paper.

I still string quite a bit for papers, and I just figure they're paying me for that specific story, they can do what they want with it. Rewrite it and put someone else's name on it for all I care. But, make sure my check is in the mail.

 

Shredded to 10?

Shredded is three graphs.

Get a clue.

12 inches to 10 is a standard staff story reduction usually.

 

Slot at our paper is a godawful job with no such free time from Thursday thru Sunday.

 

Who said a slot man in this position has a lot of free time?

X number of pages, as far as you know, could mean 12 tabloid pages in the course of a night. And it has.

 

I think Bizarro Ben Kingsley made that assertion.

 

Heh-heh. Good kick-save.