Journalism Professor Fred Vultee in his office at Wayne State University.

By Joe Grimm

A study of how readers react to copy editing may be telling us that audience needs are changing with the population and that different news platforms require different editing.

Fred Vultee, an assistant professor of journalism in Wayne State University’s Department of Communication, conducted the study. He had subjects read four edited articles and four unedited articles, and then he asked their reactions.

Vultee presented preliminary findings of his copy editing study at the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) convention in Phoenix in March.

Vultee found that readers do notice editing in news articles and that they generally like it.

ACES had pushed for research into whether editing adds value to news. Copy editors were once seen as mission-critical in producing publications. Then, executives forced to trim payrolls questioned why these editors were needed if they were not generating content as writers, photojournalists and artists do.

Vultee’s study is a response to that. He found that:

• Readers notice grammar mistakes and are bothered by them.
• They also notice inconsistencies, say, in spelling, such as p.m. vs. pm.
• Most readers are bothered less about style errors and structural problems than about grammar and professionalism issues such as consistency.
• Readers can tell edited journalism from unedited journalism, and the most dedicated readers especially prefer professionally edited articles.

Vultee is also finding interesting angles relating to diversity, though not along the traditional measures of race and gender.

Wayne State University, located in Detroit, gave Vultee’s study of 66 participants a demographic that seems reflective of where the national population is heading. Slightly fewer than half were white. One-fourth of respondents were black, and the remainder were Latino and Asian. In his campus office, Vultee said, “It speaks to what the issue of the future is going to look like.”

When Vultee asked participants whether something other than English was the primary language for them or at their homes, 14 languages were mentioned.

When people from this group read news copy in English that had been given what he called “one good, professional hard edit that was always built into the system,” they thought the stories were actually a bit less grammatical but preferred their organization and professionalism.

Vultee also notices a tendency among younger readers to be more forgiving of unedited copy. But he sees that their appreciation for edited work rises just as much as that of older readers.

The younger, more diverse study group Vultee used is a snapshot of the audience that newsrooms are trying to reach as the population changes.

People who identified their major news source as “the Internet” in general, as opposed to newspapers or TV feeds, reported that editing in the newspaper made stories seem less well organized than the unedited versions. This suggest that edits made to organize a story for print may not help online readers and that copy editors might need to develop specialties not just for topical areas like features or sports but also for platforms.

Vultee will present his findings at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in St. Louis in August. He is planning further research aimed directly at whether people say they would pay more for well-edited content and whether quality encourages them to return to websites more frequently.

Vultee’s PowerPoint presentation

Joe Grimm, a consultant and adjunct faculty member of the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, recruited for the Detroit Free Press, Knight Ridder and Gannett from 1990 until 2008. He now teaches at the Michigan State University School of Journalism. He has run the JobsPage journalism careers site at www.jobspage.com since 1996. Questions about careers? E-mail Joe for an answer.