Roundtable redux

Heidi poses a question:
Anyway, I came not to be snarky (well I guess I did) but to wonder why there is so much animosity towards COMICS WEEK from the blogosphere?

Actually, I like PW Comics Week, and several of my fellow bloggers do as well. It’s usually well written, interesting, and link-worthy.

The problem people had was with this industry roundtable, which appeared in yesterday’s issue. I didn’t bother linking to it because there wasn’t much mention of manga and because, as Tom Spurgeon observed, it was really too vague to be interesting. Also, there were lots of typos.

Heidi’s frustration is understandable but wrongly directed. She should be mad at her bosses, who are obviously not treating PWCW like a real magazine.

I worked for a real magazine and several real newspapers. Every story in those publications is read by several people besides the writer. Editors look at tone and content. A copy editor checks grammar, spelling and style and verifies that if the author says “we have five chief weapons,” five weapons are listed—you’d be amazed how often writers get that wrong. Real magazines also have fact-checkers, and having done this for a living I can tell you that no fact is too obvious or too small to be checked. (This led to some fascinating conversations, including one with the biologist who bred the supermarket strawberry and another with a cult leader who had recently tried to resurrect his dead wife. All in a day’s work.)

Does this always happen? No. I have worked for publications that did away with copy editors as a cost-cutting move, and believe me, it was a mistake. Readers don’t take a publication seriously if it has a lot of typos and small errors. Thus we get reactions like this one from a commenter on Christopher Butcher’s site:

As usual, I’m THIS CLOSE to offering to proofread the fucking thing for free because it makes me furious that it goes out every single week with ridiculous typos, but sadly I have better things to do with my time and they spend their money with other priorities in mind. I doubt I’m the only reader who finds it a huge turn-off since this is, after all, aimed at people who care about books, but I may be the only reader who reads it nonetheless.

Bloggers, of course, have no editors or fact-checkers, but we’re in a different part of the universe. The fact is, all writing is vastly improved if someone other than the writer goes over it.

From the outside, it looks like PWCW is understaffed. An editor would have flagged the content problems with the article and sent it back for retooling, even if that means delaying it for a week. A copy editor or fact checker would have caught the errors. Heidi and Calvin are good writers, and they have a knack for finding good subjects to write about, but it takes more than good writers to make a good publication. It takes editors as well. PWCW usually appears pretty seamless, but it doesn’t sound like they have much in the way of editing. It’s to her and Calvin’s credit that that isn’t obvious every week. But if PW wants us to take PWCW seriously, PW needs to take it as seriously as its dead-tree cousins.