Naples Zoo and the value of the copy editor

The zoo was great today! Perfect weather and lots of time to explore. However, no giraffes. But that's because the Naples Zoo has mostly endangered species (all may be endangered, actually) and giraffes aren't. But I think that's great because it's not just the zoo going and taking these animals out of their natural habitats to show them off, but the zoo trying to preserve and protect these beautiful species. So, no Giraffe Test -- but the Naples Zoo gets my seal of approval. It was beautiful, well kept and the habitats for all of the animals were nicely done. The zookeepers also had some good talks about the animals. (It was awesome to see two of them actually petting and playing with the lions).

But despite hating that I do it, I found myself editing all the little signs and posters throughout the zoo (luckily, not a lot of mistakes were found). It's just something that copy editing does to a person. I'm more awake at night, I edit everything from novels to restaurant menus and am even beginning to notice when people speak incorrectly. Oh, and I dream about copy editing, too. Yeesh. Yet, even with the world of journalism turning on its head because of the ever growing influence of the Web and networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, copy editing is still needed. Just because someone is reading something on a computer screen does not mean they won't catch mistakes. And slowly, copy editors are being pushed aside, the first ones to go because when a paper is faced with having to cut back on staff, what we do just doesn't seem as necessary. But a copy editor's job may be one of the most important. A reporter, and sometimes even beat editor, is not always going to notice mistakes, because that's not what they're trained to look for. They want to make sure the story sounds good, makes sense, covers all angles and has all the needed information. Thus, they tend to look at the big picture -- and even that they sometimes miss. Copy editors go into a story often as a reader would -- without much prior knowledge of the content. So they look at it with a fresh eye and catch many of the mistakes others wouldn't. So to all the copy editors out there -- fight for your jobs, because no matter what happens to print journalism there are some things that won't change, including the importance of our jobs.

This article in the Washington Post does a really great job of showing the importance of copy editors in journalism.