By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
This piece is on the editorial side of this paper now. It might interest you to know how things are done just in case you will want to have an article published on a certain issue. We are functioning with a very lean organization. So you have me as the editor, copy reader and proof reader. As I was telling somebody who was just starting his business, “You have to do everything. You are the janitor, the accountant, the messenger, the manager, the marketing person, even your own lawyer. If you have to hire a person for each of those tasks, you will be bankrupt in a month.”
With this reality, it helps if you send in your article earlier. If it needs some updating sometime in the middle of the week, Wednesday should be an ideal day. On Mondays and Tuesdays I am still recovering from the stress of the weekend. On Fridays we are practically sleepless. On good days without any snags we should be home by 12 midnight or the wee hours of Saturday. After a few hours, people would be reporting to print the hard copies. They will be disturbing me for all sorts of things they need and for any trouble during the production process.
On the dawn of Sundays I have to make sure the hard copies have reached the dealers on time or were sent to the provinces. Until I get those information I would be a bit edgy. Doing some physical work to help me decompress can be good but that is always not possible during these stormy days, and when the lack of sleep is getting the better of me. I have to get some forty winks.
So the ideal days for me receiving your article are on Wednesdays and Thursdays but those are also the days when I can do my legal work. Yet the chances of me taking a sneak on your piece would be greater on those times.
You have to take care of the basics particularly grammar and presentation. On bad days, when there are no good articles to fill the pages, I might have to take the pains of straightening out a bad article. But on good days when there are many write-ups that require less work, I would certainly choose the latter.
Many people wrongly believe that editors will be looking for big words in an article but, on the contrary, the simpler the better. This is a mass medium so what we publish must be understandable to ordinary readers.
Another thing to keep in mind is relevancy. Is your piece relevant to our readers? If not, it might not see print.
On Fridays, most of the articles come in a deluge. With eyes ableary I try my best to spot things that have to be corrected. There are always many articles that need a second look but there would be no more time for that. A very important stage in our production process is done out of town to save on cost so we are also on a very strict deadline. When the deadline is up on Friday nights we have to email the laid out paper. And we have to do so whether or not there are many grammatical errors.
Sometimes I could correct those errors when uploading in the website but looking at those articles again would even make me feel nauseous. Going back again to see the stupid mistakes? I would rather not for the sake of my sanity. Let the readers laugh at the mistakes, at least, they will have some light moments.
The worst is when I have already straightened an article and then the computer shuts down and the corrections were not reflected, and then the deadline is up. So the paper goes with errors.
As to the columns, I often don’t look at them to spot typos or other inadvertence. There is usually no more time and columnists are good writers although there are always bad times for a writer when slips of the pen are committed. Anyway, their points are usually clear.
So there. Please be guided accordingly.
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