Question #12
Usually copy editors remain fairly anonymous, but a recent incident gave a Minnesota copy editor her 15 minutes of fame. Nikki Overfelt, a first-year copy editor at the Duluth News Tribune caught a fabrication famous sports writer Mitch Albom's work. He wrote on a Friday that stuff happened the following Saturday, for Sunday's paper. And that stuff never happened. Here's the story.
While Mitch Albom is taking most of the heat, this has also placed the Detroit Free Press’ copy editors in the spotlight. While Albom screwed up, so did any copy editors who let this column go through. We should be able to assume that a copy editor read Albom's column, if for no other reason than someone had to write a headline for it. But we don't know if any copy editors raised a red flag and were ignored due to Albom’s status as a sports writer. The Chicago Tribune did a survey of all the papers that picked up Albom's column, and only one changed the wording – Nikki Overfelt at the Duluth News Tribune.
Think about the issues presented here. How would you handle such an editing task? Would you be intimidated by the writer’s status, and thus hesitant to make a correction? Do you think Nikki’s correction went far enough? Why or why not? What other action would you have taken? Any other thoughts?
posted by Kate at 10:35 AM
1 Comments:
This is an attractive anecdote: a young woman's first taste at success comes from a highly-admired writer's very public mistake. And it definitely shows some faults that exist in the newspaper process. After reading this story, it's easy to see how the occasional fabricated story slips its way onto the press and into newsstands. Journalists aren't exempt from autopilot, that spaced-out, half-paying-attention syndrome we all suffer from. It's easy to see how reading stories night after night, looking for what are usually minute errors, could get monotonous. And in that same-old, same-old, the bigger errors may be missed. While it's great that Nikki caught this error, it wasn't hers to catch (all the more credit to her). Before that story was passed around, one of its editors should have noticed the discrepancy. It will be interesting to see what becomes of the investigation into the writer. (And I can't help but wonder if editors originally went easier on him b/c of his notority, which would be a scary form of favoritism.)
12:47 AM, December 16, 2005
Post a Comment
<< Home