The old subs room: Pipes, spikes and cardigans

My old colleague, Ted Young, posted this picture of The (Manchester) Guardian subs room from the 1950s on Twitter yesterday. It shows his late father, Eric, top left with the chief sub (Katz?) looking over his shoulder. I joined my first daily subs room in the 1970s and it didn't really look much different from that. As Ted, now digital editor of the New York Daily News, says: "I love the pipes, pots of glue, spikes, different colour paper for foreign wires and, of course, cardigans." It's all a far cry from what remains of the subs rooms of today of course. If anyone has any other old newsroom pictures, please share them. 
Footnote: If newsroom nostalgia is your thing, take a look at this ... modern journalism students having a crack at producing a paper without technology.

A breakdown of a sub-editor's day

I have been training subs for the Daily Mail this week - so this piece on what subs actually do, by Andy Bodle in The Guardian, was timely as well as being a good read. As he says, it's a good excuse to run some funny cock-ups. I gave my trainees a detailed job description for subs but have never thought about dividing the average day into percentages before. Andy reckons this is how he spends his time at the newspaper coalface:

Cutting copy 40%
Rewriting 25%
Headlines, captions, standfirsts etc 14%
Punctuation 3%
Fact checking 3%
Spell checking 2%
Grammar checking 2%
Style 2%
Removing inconsistencies and tautologies 2%
Styling the text 2%
Legals 1%
Converting measurements, temperatures etc 1%
Making tenses consistent 1%
Removing cliches 1%
Bad line breaks, widows etc 1%

Difficult to argue with that. Of course Andy is talking about subbing on a national newspaper. On a regional the subs also take responsibility for the page layout, page-finishing, proof-reading and, in many cases, the web. It's more than 20 years since I have chief-subbed a paper so I am ill equipped to say how regional or local paper subs divide their time. But if anyone sitting in a hub or on a local subs desk fancies breaking down their day, let me know. If you can find the time of course.

Fancy learning to sub?

I am running an intro to subbing course in London for the Press Association next Tuesday and Wednesday. It should be a fun two days that look at the nitty gritty of what modern subs do. We will be doing some text-editing, rewriting, a bit of grammar if you need it, headline writing, use of pictures, captions and an intro to layout on InDesign. There are a few places left if anyone is interested. You can book a spot by emailing shirley.kelly@pressassociation.com. 
I am also running a two-day layout and design course on June 12 and 13. Might see you there.

An old sub's revenge ...

I am grateful to the blog, Catch the monkey while catching the monkey, for posting this little piece of history from my Northern Echo days. Back in 1982 a brash Canadian called John Pifer shipped up at the Echo as executive editor with a brief from head office to "sort out that nest of vipers." He managed to upset or sack just about all of the old school. His prized head though was that of night-editor Frank Peters, a martinet who ruled the subs room. Peters sported a handlebar moustache, occasionally wore a kilt, and was a stickler for accuracy and style. 
Eventually even the formidable Peters was ground down by Pifer and decided to quit for a position at the Times with his old editor Harold Evans. On his last day in charge, Peters ran a leg of shorts on the front of the broadsheet as usual. But this time the first letter of each headline, when read vertically, spelled out FUCK PIFER. 
Peters rode off on his moped for the last time, leaving instructions that whatever was changed on Page 1, the shorts had to stay. This alerted the composing room overseer to the fact something was amiss. He spotted the offending headlines and asked the subs to change them. When they refused he went over their heads. The fallout was amazing. Letters were sent to The Times advising that Peters was an undesirable. His official leaving party, after working for the Echo man and boy, was cancelled. Those subs who refused to change the shorts were said to have undermined the paper's editorial judgement and were forever tarnished. Apparently advertisers had been upset and threatened to boycott the paper (although in reality it became a collector's item) and for years later the group's executives would only discuss the whole affair in hushed tones. You can see why. If maverick subs used the paper to air their grievances every time they had a disagreement with management, then any credibility would disappear altogether. I'm pleased to say it did not start a wave of obscene messages hidden in newspapers but there have been other incidents. One of the most famous was ten years later when Express columnist Stephen Pollard, fed up with life under Richard Desmond, decided to leave for The Times. As a parting shot in his column, the first letter of each sentence spelled out FUCK YOU DESMOND. This time around The Times, who had welcomed Peters with open arms, took a very different view and decided not to proceed with Pollard's contract. The story is told in Media Guardian here. Remarkably, years later Pollard went back to write for Desmond's papers. Frank Peters died in 2004. His obituary in the Daily Telegraph is here.   
   

20 classic tabloid headlines

I have spent the last three weeks in Hull, training reporters to write headlines. There were 80 journalists, from the Hull Daily Mail, Scunthorpe and Grimsby Telegraphs, Lincolnshire Echo and assorted weeklies, all scribbling real headlines to stick on the wall and discuss. We also looked at the 28 rules that govern good headlines. The first is simple: The sole purpose of the headline is to catch the eye, to persuade the reader to turn to the article underneath. If the headline is boring, then it is unlikely to succeed. Avoid dull words. 

We certainly had no problem finding dull words. The list included:

Residents, Boost, Council, Adjourned, Drama, Appeal, Volunteers, Alert, Meeting, Alarm, Accommodation, Project, Services, Centre, Plans, Call to, Bid to, Proposals, Committee, Bonanza, Blueprint, Development, Fund, New, Infrastructure, Facilities, Situation, Crackdown, Local.

We even found some classic bad headlines (not from their own titles I would stress) including: 

At first we thought they were a random collection of words rather than headlines. What all these words have in common is they are non-specific - none of them build a picture in the reader's mind.
The reporters did pretty well and have since written publishable headlines for their papers. At the moment they are writing heads only on shorter stories. But who would bet against that being rolled out? 

These Northcliffe papers are not averse to using the odd pun,  as you can see from the above. But the headlines we were dealing with were, of course, very different from those in the tabloids. That didn't stop us taking time out to look at some of the classics. Here are 20 that might just brighten up your freezing cold November day.