Goodbye copy desks, hello trouble?

Newspaper Research Journal, Spring 1998 by Russial, John

Copy desk history

The copy desk as such has been around for more than 100 years. The bundle of tasks that became associated with copyediting, such as reading stories, making corrections, checking facts and writing headlines, began to evolve earlier, as newspapers became too large for one editor to manage and large enough to support various levels of division of newsroom labor. William Solomon locates the emergence of copyediting as a newsroom specialty at the end of the Civil War - at a time when metropolitan papers were becoming so large that the city editor no longer had the time to supervise reporters and edit all of their copy. By the 1890s, he said, copyediting as a distinct work position was becoming common.12

Much as in other business and industrial organizations, growth prompted the structural change in newsrooms that led to copyediting as a discrete craft and the copy desk as a separate department, particularly at large papers. As small newspaper firms became bigger and bigger businesses, they organized labor throughout all operations by subdividing jobs and developing special expertise in more narrowly defined areas. Technological changes in typesetting, platemaking, photoengraving and printing presses and developing forms of labor organization, such as strong craft unions, helped spur increasing division of labor and multiple job classifications in the production departments.13 Innovations in news technology helped define and redefine such areas as reporting, editing and photography, typically after a period of resistance and negotiation.14 The telegraph, for example, helped create a division of editing labor to manage the volume of news that first trickled, then poured through the wires. The telephone and the telephone switchboard helped editors rationalize a division of reporting into collectors of information and writers.15 The introduction of back shop data processing technology, beginning with tapedriven Linotypes and proceeding through TTS input devices, photocomposition and newsroom front-end systems, began to reverse the specialization of newspaper jobs.

Technology began to accelerate the reintegration of newspaper labor, hastening the demise of various job classifications in production departments and the decimation of production workforces.16 Video Display Terminals, for example, enabled newspapers to shift proofreading chores completely to the newsroom, spelling the end of proofreading as a composing-room responsibility. The trend toward reintegration of news labor has accelerated with pagination and digital darkroom systems, as editors and editorial department photo personnel have assumed many tasks previously done in the back shop.17

In the newsroom, the forces that led to the increasing division of labor in the l9th and early 20th centuries contrast sharply with the forces that are leading to the elimination of some of those distinctions in the late 20th century. Managing growth is no longer the issue; controlling costs, particularly labor costs, and meeting new market demands are.18