Tribune Considers Design, Copy Editing Functions to Be ‘Manufacturing’

From VisualEditors.com:

Yesterday’s statement by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild makes an interesting point. You’ll find it in the second sentence of this quote by Cet Parks, the guild’s executive director:

Tribune, through careless management practices, has saddled itself under $13 billion in debt and now Baltimore is paying a price. Tribune is siphoning good jobs from Baltimore and sending work that talented editors, reporters, photographers, copy editors and designers have done here to its home base in Chicago. That is not right.

Oh, it’s worse than that, Cet. A staffer at another Tribune paper — who wishes to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons — tells us copy desks all over six Tribune-company papers are being gutted:

Reporters and line editors are being told that their copy has to be clean enough to publish because it may not get another read. Word is the copy desk is only going to read copy for the section fronts, and they’ll get to the rest of the paper if time permits.

As if newspapers didn’t have enough problems retaining readers as it is. One big advantage newspapers — and newspaper web sites! — have over a common blogger is their fact-checking, proofreading and accuracy safeguards.

And now we’re cutting back on those. [Click for MORE] Sphere: Related Content