Mental health in the media

I've heard a few people recently say that the only profession that's doing well in this recession is journalism.

Forgive me for nearly laughing but, whenever there's a recession, history has shown that the media are among the first casualties.

What's hurting it now is that the profession, ironically, has not adjusted well to the new media age. Advertising revenues have fallen dramatically, and classifieds have virtually disappeared from news pages. Thank you very little, Craig's List.

But other factors have come in to play. Take the case of Peter Sigal, an editor at The New York Times, whom I interviewed recently for my graduate work at Columbia University. Here's his story:

Peter Sigal took a break on a couch at The New York Times, his face flush and his greased, and his curly hair pulled up and out.

That’s what happens when you run your fingers through your hair so many times, he says, worrying about subject-verb agreement or whether Sarah Palin’s name is spelled right. He’s surprised that, at age 40, he hasn’t pulled all of his hair out.

But Sigal still gets a charge out of being a copy editor despite his hectic lifestyle, increasing workload and financial pressures he faces as the news business shrinks – and what’s left of it moves to the Internet.

“It’s still a challenge,” said Sigal, a father of two who is deputy slot editor on the Times’s national desk. “You still get an adrenaline rush at deadline. You’re working at a paper where you’re making a difference.”

He enjoys serving as what he calls “one of the last eyes” on stories printed in one of the world’s most respected newspapers – even if the unpredictability and the instability of the news business, as well as the infighting and occasional crisis that affects the Times can, at times, prove to be embarrassing.

One such case involved the Times’ failure to properly supervise a young journalist named Jayson Blair, who plagiarized and fudged facts and information and stories over a five year period. Most found the saga demoralizing; he views the exerperience as educational that led to greater oversight and strengthened the newspaper’s overall quality.

“That was a failure on so many different levels,” said Sigal, who occasionally edited Blair’s copy after he was hired by the Times in 2003. “The guy wasn’t submitting receipts from the days he wasn’t supposed to be traveling.”

Sigal stays positive even as he earns what considers “low pay” for a five-day-a-week, 4 p.m.-to-12 a.m. job while fathering two young children with his wife – an Associated Press journalist who works a 6:30 a.m.-to-3:30 p.m. shift – and doing daily babysitting hand-offs with her.

“My wife and I are doing it the hard way,” he said.

He helps run a desk with that has a daily complement of anywhere from 10 to 18 editors at a time, reviewing everything from the broad – such as story placement and headlines – to the minute detail – such as spelling, style and factual mistakes.

Their mission is to check for libel or anything else that slips by the backfield editors, who serve as the first eyes on stories, edit for content and “make sure the story they got is the story they wanted, and that it makes sense,” he said.

Once the backfield editors’ work is complete, Sigal’s copy desk can pay closer attention to the smaller details of stories and “look at the stories as a page and say, ‘This headline is wrong,’” he said. “They can keep a closer look on errors.”

“The editors edit the stories, then send them to me [or the slot editor] with headlines on them and I check to make sure they fit with the story,” he said. “I’ll rewrite them if they don’t fit.”

Times are changing, however. The New York Times recently had a round of buyouts, and his copy desk has lost some copy editors along the way – though he’s not sure how many.

Each editor has assumed more responsibility, forcing them to work harder to ensure accuracy. The size of the paper is shrinking, too, as a way to save money. As a result, Sigal said, they edit smaller stories, but there are many more of them.

On one September day, his desk had to edit 25 stories in an hour “and a lot of them were 400 or 500 words. In the past we had fewer slugs and longer stories – we had 1,000 1,500 word stories,” he said.

“We have to do more and more with less,” Sigal said. “We don’t have the luxury of middling for four of five hours on a 1,000-word story.”

He spends much of his day sitting in a field of desks that resembles an orchestra – he calls it “the rim” – that encircles him as he assigns stories to editors. But the action is fast and the tension can be thick.

In his role as a deputy slot editor, Sigal has to keep an even closer eye on words and phrases, and he shoots for “economy” in the story phrasing so that the same point can be said with fewer words.

He has to match editors’ skills with certain stories – and in a 24-hour continuous cycle that has constant deadlines for an increasing number of stories, he has to decide quickly.

Some editors work better than others with a complicated investigative piece, he said. Others work better and faster on deadline. Either way, it’s his job to choose who does what, and not worry about who may be offended.

“I’m paid to be a critical thinker,” he said. “You can’t be afraid of hurting feelings.”

Many of these decisions have to be made thoughtfully but quickly – particularly when a breaking news story must move immediately to the web. Some copy editors have been arriving as much as four hours earlier to work – as early as 1 p.m. – to start making decisions on what stories get edited, and when

“A lot of what we do is being like a traffic cop,” he said.

The pace can get especially hectic when stories come in late.

For a newspaper like the Times that covers stories spanning several time zones, lateness is commonplace. Working directly with reporters to ensure that stories are accurate, clear and focus, he says, becomes even more critical.

“We are encouraged to call the reporters directly,” he said. “We’re encouraged to send them playbacks [reading the story to them] for stories we’ve edited, and the reporters expect it. In the slot, we basically demand it.”

“If a story comes back to me in the slot and the lead doesn’t support the story, then I’ll tell copy desk to redo it and we’ll go back at it,” he added.

Each decision, however, must be made as a team, he says.

Copy editors have to develop partnerships not just with each other, but also the reporters. While their names are not on the stories, he said, each article has the copy editor’s imprint.

If a lead to a story doesn’t work, copy editors shouldn’t be afraid to contact the reporter, suggest they rewrite it or, if they balk or fail to do it, the copy editors will rewrite it themselves.

“Copy editors are equal partners,” he said. “You have just as much right to correct or change a lead as anybody else.”

The hardest part of the partnership is developing trust – particularly as the evolving, 24-hour news cycle forces copy editors to work more with less, Sigal said. Getting inside a reporter’s head, he said, is impossible when the pace is moving fast, and the time for a deep analytical edit job is short.

The Jayson Blair controversy, for example, was an example of a “failure of supervision” and partnership that has become more common as the news industry gets smaller and “we’re being asked do more and more with less,” but the demand for immediacy is greater, he said.

In Blair’s case, he says, there was too much trust. Though he wasn’t promoted to the deputy slot position until 2005, Sigal takes partial responsibility for the failures.

“I remember talking to him one time – he filed two stories from Virginia Beach and another from Montgomery County, Md.,” Sigal said. “I called him and I said, ‘Jayson that’s pretty far. How did you file these two stories?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, man. I finished that one in Virgina, I got in my car and jammed up.”

“In hindsight, he was probably in Brooklyn the whole time,” he said.

Sigal ultimately was forced to copy edit the 14,000-word “correction” the Times did for Blair’s articles – a task that took 17 hours for himself and another editor to complete.

Such work stretches him thin – and makes him wonder whether he’ll put up with the erratic pace of the job once his his children, who are 2 and 7 months old, are older.

But he and his wife have managed to still love the profession enough that they make sacrifces in order to survive in it – even though they rarely go on vacations together and can’t afford daycare.

“She was in Iraq last fall and she was six months pregnant,” Sigal said of his wife. “We have a little bit of a challenge.”