Copy Editing and How Language Can Change the Meaning of a Story
Emerson Malone is a copy editor for BuzzFeed News who is based in Los Angeles. He graduated from the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication in 2017. During his time at the University of Oregon, he worked as the copy chief at Envision Journalism and as a podcast editor, and as an arts and culture editor for The Emerald Media Group. He also wrote stories and profiles for the UO School of Architecture & Allied Arts as a communications assistant before he graduated and started at Buzzfeed News in June 2017. At Buzzfeed news he works as a copy editor, reports on breaking news stories and reviews new book releases. I was able to interview Malone about his job at BuzzFeed News and how social media is involved in his work as a copy editor.
This interview as been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell me a little bit about what your job consists of?
So basically logging on every day. My day-to-day is we receive requests from desk editors who are the ones assigning stories to reporters. Since you’re familiar with the output of BuzzFeed news, you know it’s sort of a varied collection of beats and a lot of different stories that are thrown our way. But it’s usually photo essays, newsletters, videos. We have a story coming out on people who regret buying their home. We have a story about Khloe Kardashian getting skin cancer and the importance of checking yourself for skin cancer. And culture desk is what a lot of our focus going forward is going to be. Our editor and chief is the former culture editor. So we have a lot of long-form culture pieces in the works.
Copy editing is going into a draft ironing it out, taking a practiced measured approach to reporting. A lot of breaking news reporters don’t have the luxury of taking their time, thinking about their words, thinking about their language. Copy editors are in there to clean it up. And act as a liaison for the reader and if I feel that the reader might get confused, I make a suggestion. And I talk to the reporter or I talk to the editor.
What skills and experience do you think helped you get your job at Buzzfeed News?
I think the thing that stood out on my resume is something that I didn’t necessarily feel like I learned a lot from. I worked at Envision as a copy editor and was their Copy chief where I worked with their group of copy editors. I think having a title that said copy chief on my resume was what caught their eye. But I had way more copy-editing experience at the Emerald. I was there from 2014 to 2017. Initially as an arts and culture editor and then created their podcast desk and then just worked in audio for the last year. I did a lot of copy editing there, working with reporters and pitching and developing things.
Do you use social media in your job as a copy editor?
Yeah. In the responsibilities I spelled out earlier I realized it doesn’t sound like social media is central to all of that, and it really isn’t. Like I technically don’t have to look at any social media to do this task. But we have a Twitter account for our copy desk. I don’t know of any other copy desk at any other newsroom in the U.S. that has its own Twitter account. So we have @styleguide. We used to share like internal conversations about what we are arguing about, style decisions, and observations we made about the language. Interesting articles about language. That account specifically follows other copy editors and grammar people and it’s like plugged into a language-focused corner of social media.
Probably like eighty percent of what we post nowadays is grammar memes. I have the login. We are only a four-person team and we all have the login. We can all tweet and post memes. We try to tweet every day, but not always. We also have a newsletter that we plug and promote through our Twitter.
If you search quibbles and bits, you can see like we have written about appropriating black vernacular and how to write about autistic people and neurodivergent people and ablism in language. Oh, like how to write about abortion and reproductive rights but still use inclusive gender-neutral language.
Outside of using Twitter to make memes Emerson brought up that:
A lot of social media discourse informs how we frame headlines and stories. And if you look at and just pay attention to discourse about people’s choice of words and hear them out and see what their line of thinking is. We take that into account and then I’m actively applying those to different stories.
Two examples I can think of, I think in January of 2021, Phil Spector died. And you know how Twitter always has a main character of the day? That morning it was all about how no one knows how to frame this obituary about Phil Spector dying. Because everyone was just writing glowing things about how like, “he just did so much for pop music”. He was actually a very scary, abusive toxic guy who murdered somebody. And I pre-wrote Septor’s obituary because I knew discourse was going to be shitty that day. And I talk about his effect on pop music, but our headline puts convicted murderer before pop producer.
The other and more consequential one was the death of George Floyd. We picked up that story which was probably like three days after it happened. I was noticing on Twitter how a lot of people were pointing out headlines we’re saying, that Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd. Just knelt. Like a very passive action. Just like he was resting his knee there or something. I made the unilateral decision to change our headline from Chauvin knelt on Floyd, to Chauvin used a knee chokehold on Floyd. I thought we needed to use language that actively underscores the violence of this moment. But yeah, sometimes social media discourse can help us frame things in a different way. And how news outlets frame something directly informs a reader’s perspective and bias.
