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Mark Meadows -- copy editor

The Capital Times  —  4/26/2008 8:11 am

Mark Meadows is the young man you saw walking to work at dawn on Fish Hatchery Road, in all kinds of weather, wearing sneakers and jeans, long hair and steel-rim glasses, on his way to bring his literacy, news judgment and wit to another day's editions of The Capital Times.

Mark was a copy editor for 10 years and also put together the pages of the weekly Rhythm section. That meant his name was rarely in the paper. But Mark didn't mind because he knew, as the best copy editors do, that his fingerprints were all over the product -- in creative headlines, in readable stories, in artful layouts, in all the errors you didn't see because he saw them first. He took a real delight in this, and brought to his work a well-honed sense of irony and amusement about popular culture and events in the news.

For years Mark worked long Friday nights as the anchor editor of the Saturday Weekender edition. This could be a harrowing job because there were precious few people around to get you out of a jam at 3 a.m. On more than one occasion Mark used his technical savvy to rescue the edition.

But Mark didn't join the paper to be a technician, and that is what copy desk work had lately become -- less the educated craft of editing and improving stories and more the mechanical chore of placing them on a computer screen.

Mark is young in his career and says he hopes to stay in editing, but in "a longer form, not so ephemeral" as daily newspapers or Web news; maybe books. Here's hoping he can spread his wings.

From Ron McCrea, senior news editor

The Capital Times  —  4/26/2008 8:11 am