Man, this is gonna be my most narrowcasted post ever, but I have to do it….

As I mentioned in some previous posts, I have invested a large part of my professional life in ‘editing’ - a poorly understood, rapidly degrading craft that can mean anything from ghost authorship to napkin note transcription. The vast majority of people have no opinion of editing or editors, with the possible exception of those magical moments when some sort of amusing fuck up makes it way into a newspaper headline or 24 hour news station crawl, and we can all enjoy a brief flicker of schadenfreude as we knowingly declare that “Somebody’s getting fired for that!”

Those people who do know something about editing and who occasionally work with editors generally take them for granted, viewing them as either (at best?) spell checkers or (at worst?) a lower class of collaborator whose contributions, because they are invisible, they have no obligation whatsoever to acknowledge.

Editors allow these indignities because we see the bigger picture. Our interest is in protecting quality and maximizing potential. We didn’t get into this to be stars. We’re like the dude in Prodigy who sits and the back and quietly provides the music while that crown looking guy runs around stage screaming and pointing at himself. But that is not to say that we’re humble or that we believe for one second that our contribution is as insignificant as our low profile (and earnings) would imply.

We let a lot of shit slide, but everyone has a breaking point and from personal experience, both as observer and participant, I advise you to never be on the wrong side of an editor. Because if provoked, if degraded or publicly shamed, we will break your weak, poorly thought out, insufficiently proof read shit DOWN. As exemplified by the following story that my man hard editing Tom just sent to me…

It comes from a post on a site called The Torontoist entitled “Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Revenge”

Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs. In the press release issued by the union in the wake of the announcement, union chief Maureen Dawson explained that “Journalism is a collaborative effort, the product of a team of reporters, photographers and editors working in concert to produce the kind of activist agenda that has served Star readers and our community so well for so long…To remove a critical element of that work is to shortchange everyone who depends on it.”

Now, one (apparent) editor at the Star has decided to show us all the benefits of collaboration. An extensively marked-up copy of Publisher John Cruickshank’s internal memo announcing the changes was sent to Torontoist by a self-described “intermediary who was asked to send this for a friend who works at the Star” this morning; it’s, allegedly, “the work of a Star editor.”

Clear here to see a larger version of the image. (If you care, it’s worth it.)

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