The invisible profession

Editing is the invisible profession. I say that because it's very hard to show, or even tell, people what you do. Editors take a piece of writing, improve it, and pass it along. The edited version may be quite different from the original, but when it appears in print, there is no acknowledgement of the editor's contribution. And the editor certainly can't say to the guys, "Hey, see this sentence about the mayor about halfway down? That was a sentence fragment before I got through with it!" Try that sometime and see what kinds of looks you get.

Given this invisibility, editors crave any sort of creative outlet they can find. Among newspaper copy editors, that outlet is headlines. Yes, those headlines in your daily paper are written by copy editors, not the reporters. And you would not believe how much work goes into some of those headlines. I don't think I have ever known a copy editor who didn't enjoy writing an accurate headline with an attention-getting twist.

I'll always remember my greatest headline. I was working part-time on the Orlando Sentinel copy desk and was assigned a front-page story about a small Orlando attraction called the Holy Land Experience. The operators of the Holy Land Experience had been in a dispute with the city over property taxes. The Holy Land Experience contended it was a ministry, and therefore tax exempt, but the city insisted it was an attraction. Finally, a judge ruled that the Holy Land Experience did owe taxes. I had to write a two-column, three-deck head in a fairly large type size, but I managed to come up with something that was accurate and creative. It was:

Holy Land
must render
unto Caesar

I was excited about that head, but I thought there was a strong chance the editors above me might conclude that the average reader wouldn't understand the biblical allusion and would ask me to rewrite it. However, they did approve it and it appeared in the paper the next morning, visible from every paper box in the city. I got lots of compliments from my fellow copy editors and even heard my headline read on a local radio talk show the next day.

That was a copy editor's dream come true--visibility.