A tribute to sub-editors; the invisible journalists who crave no publicity

by Pearl Thevanayagam

(July 01, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Would the world come to an end if I spelt ‘Jayewardene’ with an ‘a’ at the end?

Not usually. But the Daily News being state-owned and ergo under the patronage of president Jayewardene I would have committed a serious faux pas. At the most I could have been sacked.

Were it not for Visaka Cooke, Anton Kurukulasuriya and Chandra de Silva at the Daily News, the late Sarath Premadasa, Raine Wickrematunga, Winston de Valliere and many other distinguished sub-editors at Weekend Express, Weekend and the Sunday Leader whose names elude me with passing years I would have been regularly hot-footing it to the Courts being indicted for the many inadvertent violations of media ethics.

While reporters gather news and quickly scribble illegible stories in time for the first edition to go out, it is our sub-editors who sit quietly with Lifco and OED and pull us over for clarification. They also give our stories pithy headlines which sell newspapers.

Exit the executive, In her own time, for stories on Chandrika’s promises to abolish the executive presidency, Staggering cost of Sri Lanka’s heroin trip to highlight the island’s drug menace, Infant prodigies or infantile parents for a take on Colombo’s pushy parents with money who exhibit their children’s ‘masterpieces’ at galleries and convince diplomats to grace the occasion, In the lair of the Tiger for a story on visiting a rebel leader in Batticaloa, Inside forbidden territory for another account of a visit to rebel-held North, Silly me, diddled by a pavement peddler on shopping in Pettah pavements and Sleeping with the enemy for a satire on mosquito menace; these are some appetizers for the stories to follow.

Yet the sub-editors never ever get a byline. They are the actual guardians of the media and they are as essential for a media organization as oxygen is to breathing.

Some of you may remember the time in the nineties when the MTV director was sacked and was produced in court for the mistake of his announcer who could not tell the difference between curfew and state of emergency.

Had there been a sub-editor to quickly go through the news before being broadcast this would never have happened.

Then there was the famous mixing up of captions with A.C.S. Hameed and a beauty queen which landed Manik De Silva, the editor of Daily News in court. Hameed was no great looker and the beauty queen had not much of a cerebrum but the minister took umbrage at being mistaken for the beauty queen. I would however have thought this a compliment to Mr Hameed.

Getting back to our subs it is they who spot the occasional zero missing in the budget allocations when we write Rs10 million when we really wanted to write Rs100 million.

They can also be too politically correct when I spell Jayewardene with an ‘a’ at the end. Visaka told me that I was insulting his family name by ignoring his name which should be spelt with `e’ throughout. She mumbled something about caste.

I once wrote the word ‘coolies’ to describe upcountry Tamils. Mr Kurukulasuriya was livid. I honestly did not mean any offence since that was how the upcountry Tamils were called in those days.

Then there was a paediatrician at Lady Ridgeway called Dr Lamabadusuriya.. I was not very fluent in Sinhala and Lambada was on the charts. So I wrote his name as Lambadasuriya. This time the ever so serious Manik De Silva gave a small chuckle and I knew he forgave me.

Manik was such a nit-picking editor that he put all our subs to shame. He made me write a story running to a full page five times and threatened to bin it if I did not get it right the final time because I did not adhere to the syntaxes and grammar such as semi-colons, colons, brackets etc. For Pete’s sake I was sweating it over with the new computer after spending eight hours at BMICH writing down commission evidence from seven senile commissioners while a few were dropping off to sleep and waking up just in time before closing time.

Now thanks to those invincible sub-editors I now taunt other budding journalists with my correct usage for journalese.