T

his 
September, 
The Michigan 
Daily held its 
Bicentennial 

reunion 
weekend. 
Daily 

alumni 
from 
across 
the 

country 
were 
invited 
to 

return 
to 
our 
beloved 

newsroom and, among other 
things, mingle. As many of 
you know, “mingle” translates 
into “network” in hyper-
competitive college speak. As 
one of my fellow managing 
editors so elegantly put it to 
me, fidgeting in her heels and 
with an air of resignation, 
“Come to happy hour if you 
want a job.”

And that I did. I went, drank 

a little wine to make myself 
more pleasant and talked. 
And after conversation after 
conversation with Pulitzer 
winner after Pulitzer winner, 
something 
became 
very 

clear to me: I was making a 
mistake.

According to everyone I 

met that night — extremely 
successful leaders in their 
fields, mind you — dedicating 
myself to copy editing was 
a waste of time. The job 
I’ve spent three nights a 
week at for months was not 
going to exist in a few years; 
copy editing, they informed 
me, was quickly becoming 
obsolete.

Another notable quote from 

the evening: “Oh, don’t go 
into copy. Can’t your design 

editor show you InDesign or 
something?”

I like my job. It’s demanding 

but rewarding, and I get paid 
to be nitpicky — something 
people, mostly ex-boyfriends, 
consider one of my greatest 
faults. I delete commas and 
I fact-check. I get to blithely 
inform writers that “people 

affected by the aftermath 
of 
the 
hurricane” 
could 

and should be shortened to 
“Hurricane María victims.” 
I like it, and I’m qualified for 
it. In considering post-grad 
options, a looming concern 
in my final year of college, I 
naturally gravitated toward 
copy editing. I thought it’d 
be a safe bet for an English/
Spanish major who didn’t 
want to teach. It was, to put it 
lightly, a rude awakening.

I had been paying attention 

to the goings-on in my 
prospective field, of course, 
but not really; when I saw 
that The New York Times 
was doing away with their 
copy desk entirely I was sad 
(and I pulled my subscription, 
half out of support for those 
striking and half out of 
spite) but I considered it 

an isolated incident. What 
I hadn’t realized until that 
night, a few months before 
my graduation, was that 
newspapers 
across 
the 

country are downsizingtheir 
desks significantly.

This gem I found after 

falling 
down 
a 
massive 

research rabbit hole for this 
piece sums it up nicely. And 
people are noticing; “no other 
job classification has suffered 
so many losses as the news 
business downsizes,” CNN 

reported, and it’s the reason 
you’ve been seeing so many 
typos in online articles as of 
late. And while The Times’s 
corrections 
of 
misprinted 

facts may sometimes be funny, 
this 
mass 
disappearance 

of editors is representative 
of a much larger cultural 
phenomenon and one that 

has 

become especially prevalent 
since the 2016 election.

Facts just aren’t priority 

anymore. This 
is not 
a 

revolutionary 
statement; 

Donald 
Trump’s 
shaky 

relationship 
with 

documented 
occurrences 

has 
been 
well-reported. 

Post-truth 
was 
Oxford 

Dictionary’s 2016 word of the 
year. Alternative facts were 
not a one-time press gaffe 
but instead have become a 
cultural phenomenon. And 

not to perpetuate the whole 
“fake news” nonsense, but 
this shift manifests itself in 
the media as the sacrifice of 
copy editors, the ones whose 
job it is to make sure the 
facts are true and correctly 
represented.

With 
the 
omnipresence 

of 
the 
internet 
and 
its 

instantaneous 
refreshing, 

breaking a story before a 
competitor has become more 
important than ensuring its 
quality. Modern American 
media 
and 
culture 
have 

regressed to a place where 
fact-checking 
just 
isn’t 

important anymore, and it’s 
telling.

As for me, I’ll be fine. 

I’m currently working on 
“diversifying,” which you all 
know is hyper-competitive 
college speak for “starting at 
square one,” but I have some 
ideas. Maybe I’ll finally learn 
how to use InDesign. What 
keeps me up at night isn’t 
my 
personal 
professional 

instabilities but the larger 
existential 
questions 
they 

bring up: Do veracity and 
accuracy hold any cultural 
weight anymore? Can I fit 
in a society that blatantly 
disregards 
all 
I’ve 
been 

conditioned to care about? 
How do we determine truth 
if there is little punishment 
for a lie? How do we make 
sense of nonsensical daily 
occurrences? How did we get 
here? Do we care?

2B

Managaing Statement Editor:

Lara Moehlman

Deputy Editors:

Yoshiko Iwai

Brian Kuang 

Photo Editor:

Alexis Rankin

Editor in Chief:

Emma Kinery

Design Staff:

Michelle Phillips

Hannah Myers 

Emily Hardie

Erin Tolar

Emily Koffsky

Managing Editor:

Rebecca Lerner

Copy Editors:

Elizabeth Dokas 

Taylor Grandinetti

Wednesday, November 1, 2017 // The Statement 

Copy That: Fact-checking alternative facts

BY ELIZABETH DOKAS, COPY CHIEF

statement

THE MICHIGAN DAILY | NOVEMBER 1, 2017

ILLUSTRATION BY ERIN TOLAR

