Register to Outsource Copy Editing from India

Call me Old-Fashioned, but I’d like to think no one knows Orange County better than the folks who cover it – the OC news media at the Register, the LA Times, the Daily Pilot, OC Weekly and a host of excellent weekly newspapers. 

So I am disheartened to learn from MediaBistro and the OC Weekly’s Navel Gazing blog that the Register may soon outsource a weekend copyediting shift to a company in India.  Copy editors in general are among the most useful employees a good newspaper can have.  They save the asses of reporters who sometimes make simply mistakes in writing a story on deadline that might otherwise change the entire context of a newspaper story. 

Show me a reporter who says they never make mistakes in their writing and I’ll show you a liar.

Copy editors now have a huge target on their backs from cost-cutting owners.  Papers will get by with fewer copy editors and more mistakes will result and be more obvious.  Cutting copy editors from the newsroom is like taking the safety belt off your car and skipping the break job all at the same time.

This article in the NY Times this week sums it up well.