Ed Park at Harper’s Magazine:
I started at the Voice while in grad school in 1994. I was new to the city, in love with it but slightly terrified. I was looking for part-time work, and a friend of a friend put me in touch with the copy chief at the paper. I passed the test, armed with Webster’s 10th and Chicago 14 and a much-thumbed xeroxed packet covering house style. I took a couple shifts a week, usually from 11 am to 7 pm, working in a sunny room on the third floor with the rest of copy and fact-checking—about a dozen people, most days.
We stared at our ATEX monitors, which had the scrapyard aesthetic of Seventies science fiction: amber letters on scuzzy screens, chunky keyboards that crackled like small-arms fire. When a new story hit the queue, we newbies raced to give it a read. I’d swoop in if I saw, say, a piece by the art-house film reviewer J. Hoberman or the gossip columnist Michael Musto or the soi-disant “dean of American rock critics,” Robert Christgau. None of them ever phoned it in. Other names invited hesitation, and the copy chief would prod us over ATEX. Once you entered corrections and queries, you’d type your initials in the “c1” field at the top and return it to the editor, who would process the changes and send it back to the queue for a second read.
more here.
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