As they write the headlines, captions and summaries and help, with designers, to create the eye-catching visual punctuation on a page, sub-editors are, in effect, the copywriters of the commercial publishing business. Their job is to sell a story and make other writers look good, and anything you read in a professionally produced publication will certainly have been subjected to the interventions of at least one of them.
Sub-editors are also the primary sense-makers on a publication. Everybody's original writing contains errors they can't see - missed words, misspellings whose meaning a word processor’s spell-checker won't pick up, lapses in logic or sequence and often erroneous assumptions about prior reader knowledge. As a sub-editor you get to see and deal with them all.
It is the sub's job to summarise, synthesise and drive shape into raw copy, and their first task is to create consistency. They will ensure the words used are concise and that meaning is spelt out clearly. Unfamiliar terminology will be explained, and they check facts, spelling and grammar and remove ambiguity. These are things writers regularly miss in their own material.
As such, sub-editors learn to become extremely fussy about language and how it is used on the page. And they must become the pickiest of proof-readers.
Such animals are indispensable to publishers because, above all, as “production” journalists they are the people who, with designers, transform words into publications. There is not one that exists without them. And it is they who give a title its voice.
So, if you want to ensure your publications will work properly beyond an arresting headline and throughout each step of the publishing process, find yourself a professional sub-editor.
The professional editing process
Ideally, when copy arrives in the newsroom it will be too long to be used in full. This is always desirable: it is much easier to cut story matter to fit than it is to pad it out. It is sub-editors who manipulate text to meet the constraints of a page's layout.
As such, they will work closely with designers, paying particular attention to the publication’s typographical and layout rules to uphold the material's graphical appearance. Then, when copy is on the page, they will impose the title's “style” on the text – the house rules by which a publication ensures consistency in its references to people, places, organisations, job positions, and so on.
For example: the title of The Australian Financial Review will always be italicised in references to it; a first mention of the United States in a story may be written in full but all subsequent references abbreviated to the US; a first mention of $US1 billion ($1.55 billion) will be converted into the appropriate local currency, and so on.
This is of course just a summary and there may be significant variation between the different media and titles in which the sub-editor's role is exercised, and in the precise ways in which words are used and styles applied.
Nevertheless, the core disciplines of editing as described here will be consistent wherever journalists are found working in a professional publishing environment.
