Copyediting is not obsolete. People who don’t know it well just think it is.
You might as well say script doctors are obsolete. The movies would be making you laugh even more than they do now, and I don’t mean the comedies.
People don’t know how to do plumbing either. If they tried to make plumbers obsolete . . . I won’t go on . . .
Copyediting is not obsolete. People who don’t know it well just think it is.
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True or not, the people who think it is are the ones in charge.
Just like the people who thought that American software coding was obsolete for the past 15-20 years.
And then there are the typesetters...
At any rate, I think it’s wonderfully comical that the J-school graduates who thought their jobs were as secure as plumbers, morticians, corporate accountants, or (God forbid) HR employees are now getting a taste of what funemployment entails.
And if they’re not, they need to be, considering their biggest qualification nowadays is the ability to tell lies until they become the truth.
“As a medium, print is on an irreversible decline relative to digital. We are headed for an inflection point at which print newspapers as we knew them in the past will be unsustainable.
Like it or not, print must change.
If you are a wire editor or features editor, your odds of surviving in such a position until retirement are slim to none. Those jobs are obsolete. We can not save a system in which thousands of people sit around reinventing the wheel in parallel processes all around the country.
The Tribune Company’s bankruptcy raises the urgency of facing this issue, but it will be an issue for everyone sooner or later. This is just another case of “the future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”
If you imagine that jobs will simply move from a print focus to an Internet focus, you’re wrong. Some jobs, like the wire editor and the features editor, will disappear. The Internet presents us with completely new tasks, requiring different skill sets.” HEH HEH