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Thursday, June 12, 2003 - 1:46 p.m.

No one takes responsibility anymore

I'm not cut out to be an editor. Or a "fact-checker," for that matter. I'm a writer. I know both sides of the game, and I know how they should work together, and they don't.

"Our job" as fact-checkers/copy editors, someone just said to me in a debate we just had about a small error that made it into the magazine, "is to wipe their asses." Fuck no! In a sense, it may be, but not to that extent, even metaphorically. I don't buy it.

OK, backstory: A staff writer who doesn't work in this office sent an e-mail to an editor for whom she wrote a short item (maybe 30 words) and a name of someone in the piece appeared twice, with the name misspelled on second reference. That editor forwarded the e-mail to the copy chief. It began, "Do we even have cop editors?" and went on to complain about the misspelling "in a VERY small piece" and how it wasn't caught. She took no responsibility for filing it wrong in the first place and the editor who passed it on, who also read over it, merely wrote "FYI" in the e-mail, nothing more.

Fuck that. Don't try to throw the blame on the copy department just because you spell the name (not a common one, either) wrong and don't proofread your own work � even when the piece is VERY short. She has no defense against that, either, seeing as how she asked if we have "cop" editors. Didn't even read over her own complaint.

This pisses me off. Yes, an editor's job is to correct the mistakes the writers make, whether or not they are the stereotypical disheveled savants who always have 12 things happening at once. Someone tried to explain to me that copy editors and fact checkers get shit and just have to take it. I understand that that's the way it's been, and that's the way it will continue to be. I just don't feel like sitting here and taking it, mainly, in this case, because she took no responsibility herself.

Nobody takes pride in their work anymore. I see the crap our "writers" send in, and I'd be ashamed to submit that anywhere. As a writer, I at least read over what I'd written before sending it, and I would occassionally reluctantly submit something I wasn't wild about but I was always sure that it was as accurate as I could make it considering the constraints of time or resources. The way I see it, writers have no business bitching about editing when editing misses their mistakes if they don't take the time to give their stories at least a once-over before filing them. They shouldn't complain so much considering they never offer a "thank you" when they discover their work rewritten and made obviously better. And I shouldn't have to sit here and put up with that crap from writers considering the pay scale. I hate to complain about money, but when I was hired to do one job and I'm now clearly (in action and in title) doing a more important one at the original salary and I know that my immediate departmental peers earn at least $10,000 more than I do, it makes it hard to put up with that. What job doesn't award a raise with a promotion? Plenty, I know, but how many do it under the guise of "we're not adjusting the budget until the fall, at the earliest" and then go out an hire four more people in the following months? That's what bothers me.

But back to the bitchy writer.

"Nobody puts themselves in the other's shoes," someone said during our discussion. Well, I can. I realize that the writers are working on several things at once, often starting from scratch, working days or weeks on a story, and building it all up to the final product. Then we get that stuff, and we're asked to check it for accuracy in hours, while also doing the same for two or three other stories, all of which have to be completed and "closed" by the end of the work day.

I'm sorry, but really, people just need to take more responsibility.

Know what would be a start?

"OK, yeah, we're sorry, but we really had no hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Our bad."

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