[Ipg-smz] A question for everyone, particularly Esther Schindler

[Christine Hall]

In the late 90s a copy editor for a print paper reworded a graf to 
change my opinion from pro to con. When I spoke to her about it, her 
reaction was simply that "writers often don't like to be edited," and 
couldn't see that my objection was to her changing the meaning of what 
I'd written. At that point, I marched into the editor's office (I had a 
long term relationship with him) and showed him the problem. That copy 
editor never touched my copy after that.

Back in the 70s I wrote a short story for a low budget Canadian Science 
Fiction magazine. Something went wrong with the typesetting, so in the 
edition it had the first half of the story repeated twice, without the 
second half.

Christine Hall
Publisher & Editor
FOSS Force: Keeping tech free
http://fossforce.com

On 2/8/19 10:53 AM, Daniel Dern wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Feb 2019, Joe Stanganelli wrote:
>> I don’t mind having my jokes removed; just please don’t change or replace
>> them.
> 
> Yeah, there was a ComputerWorld article whose lede was changed to be, as 
> far as I was concerned, dissing my fellow nerds. The copy editor for my 
> Internet book who tried deleting some of the jokes (thankfully, my 
> contract said I had final approval), and one of my humorous columns for 
> InformationWeek, which, while all of editorial was out for a multi-day 
> retreat, was 50+% rewritten by a temp/freelance/intern... who didn't 
> bother mentioning that they'd taken a few, ahem, liberties. And, it 
> being hardcopy, wasn't fixable.
> 
> OTOH, some is inevitable and not malicious. E.g., back in those 
> pre-Internet days, one of my first music reviews for the Boston Globe 
> lost the last inch or so or copy -- which, of course, had the wrap-up -- 
> to a late-arriving ad. That taught me that, for articles and venues like 
> this, to keep the important stuff up front, rather than "build to a 
> boffo finish."
> 
>