Greenslade on why there's no need for subs

Yes, you read it right. An advocate for good journalism dissing subs? Have a read and tell me what you think:

Subeditors: another attempt to explain why they are becoming redundant

An interesting little discussion broke out yesterday afternoon over the value and fate of newspaper subeditors during a Publishing Expo seminar at London's Olympia.

I used the opportunity to make clear where I stand on the subject, but probably failed to get across that I do not approve of the wholesale junking of a section of journalists. (And whatever writers, reporters and columnists might think, subs are journalists too). MORE

I reckon we still need those subs, eh?

I've attached David Marsh's comment on the Giles Coren rant. He does put a good point across that subs are more important nowadays in the digital age. What I wonder though is this - he mentions all these people who diss subs, including, might I add, colleagues in his own paper. No surprise there.

The thing is that if the people who hold the purse strings feel the same way, then the cuts are going to happen anyway right, whether or not the quality of the media product deteriotates or not.

What do you think?

Excoriating the coruscating Coren
Giles Coren's blistering rebuke to a hapless Times subeditor actually highlights what a vital role subs still play in the media

If only Giles Coren had given his email to a good subeditor before sending it, he might have got his point across effectively without revealing himself to be arrogant, petulant, pompous and, frankly, the last person you'd want to be stuck in a restaurant with.

As a sub by trade, it pains me to say it, but the foul-mouthed food critic was actually in the right: the hapless Times sub who removed a harmless sounding "a" from the last sentence of his column did subtly change the meaning and remove a joke (although one so obscure that it must be said Coren poses no immediate threat to the writers of, say, Peep Show).

What the email lacks is a sense of proportion. After ranting at length about his knowledge of Yiddish, laboriously explaining the aforementioned joke ("looking for a nosh has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob" – hilarious!), and comparing the sub to "a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance [sic] fresco and thinking jesus [sic] looks shit with a bear so plastering over it", our tortured artist turns his attention to metre: "Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on 'nosh' is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable." This, apparently, is "pre-GCSE scansion" (what kind of advanced academy of linguistics was Coren attending at 15?).

Then comes the eloquent clincher: "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." Well, to be fair, it scans perfectly.

Putting to one side the thought that being a sub at the Times right now must be about as rewarding an occupation as trying to sell Mother's Day cards to a Canoe Wife's sons, I'm struck by the fact that Coren's onanistic outburst is the latest in a series of recent attacks on subeditors. MORE

'The sub-editing function is obsolete'

Comforting isn't it?

In deleting subs, CityAM is in good company: a 'paper in Peterborough or somewhere'

Is London's financial freesheet undermining journalism with crude cost cutting, or just becoming more efficient? Simon Evans meets its owners

'Managers need to take care of stressed staff, especially now," proclaimed an article in CityAM, the London freesheet, last week. Just days earlier, the company's management had served notice on all of its sub-editing workforce, its web editor, a reporter and two members of the sales team.

Hardly the stuff to boost morale but a necessary move in the current climate, Jens Torpe, the paper's co-founder, said on Wednesday. "I don't understand why people are so surprised," he says in a rather exasperated way. "A number of newspapers in the UK have been doing without subs for a long while."

Unfortunately, he scratches around to name any, save for a "paper in Peterborough or somewhere".

He rebuts the suggestion that the move, coming after nearly three years of a subbed and generally well-regarded CityAM, has been forced on the company because of a lack of cash in the credit crunch.

"I don't know how many hundreds of people have been made redundant at the Telegraph, but nobody says they are going under. It's absolutely ridiculous. When we launched, we gave the editor the authority to build his editorial staff. He did it, and within budget, in a very short space of time.

"In the last couple of months, we've looked at potential ways to make the company more efficient, and feedback from editorial was that we should put more resources into front-line writing journalists," he adds. "There is a limit to the resources we have. That was how the new model came about. We have done three days under the new regime now, so it can be done. I have every confidence and trust in our journalists."

Co-founder Lawson Mun-caster is rather brusquer: "The sub-editing function is obsolete. I believe writers can take responsibility for filing copy that is readable and correct with a headline." MORE

Who needs those bloody subs anyway?!?!

About 40 editing jobs expected to go at Fairfax

NZPA

Fairfax Media, which owns The Dominion Post and The Press among other publications, today flagged lay-offs of about 40 sub-editors.

The company said it had 190 sub-editors across the group and although initial indications suggested about 40 redundancies, no firm numbers could be given until after a consultation period.

The move is another blow to the news media industry. This month the New Zealand Press Association announced it was cutting seven jobs and last year TVNZ cut nearly 60 news and current affairs jobs while The New Zealand Herald's publisher, APN New Zealand, cut 70 sub-editors in an out-sourcing move.

APN said at the time it w anted to centralise the sub-editing of all its print titles with Pagemasters, which hired up to 50 people.

Fairfax Media said today that the move was part of its plan to have "national centres of expertise" for world, features and business pages on its nine daily newspapers. More generic pages such as the weather and tv pages could follow. MORE

So ... does this represent a slow and steady erosion of the standards of journalism???