Not long ago, The Washington Post ran this piece on the copy editor. It was written in an email to Post staffers by Deborah Howell, the paper's ombudsman, and was judged by Metro copy editor Jeff Baron to be "such a good and succinct description of how copy editors see their work that I thought it was worth sharing with readers."
A couple of days ago, Howell devoted her ombudsman's column to the "evolving" (some might say dying) art of copy editing. I especially like the quote from Bill Walsh, the national copy desk chief: "A lot of the time, the drawing-out-sources-and-ferreting-out-facts gene and the tighten-it-and-polish-it-up gene aren't contained in the same person." Which is to say that reporters may get all the facts, but may also be in such a rush to write the story and get it to press, that they can get a trifle sloppy with the way they express them (or, sometimes, with the facts themselves).
God (or the Devil) is in the details. And copy editors are there to see that one or other gets its due. Even though newspaper copy editing staffs are being cut back, let's hope that someone is always there to catch those itty-bitty errors that can create havoc and embarrassment later.
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