WHY COPY EDITORS ARE HEROES: Fellow copy editor Tom Mangan has a post that encapsulates why copy editors are the "straw that stirs the drink" at newspapers. When his paper found out about the death of Waylon Jennings, they kicked it into crisis mode and triumphed:

We got the news of his death at about 4:15 p.m. Pacific Time yesterday, which was an hour and 15 minutes before our page deadline for the Thursday Arts & Entertaiment section, whose main section had a story on, of all people, Willie Nelson performing in the Bay Area next week...That decision was made less than an hour before our deadline. We had no story, no photos, no headlines, no captions at 4:30 but had it all within 60 minutes in time to make our deadline. A fun hour, one of the things that keeps people working in the news biz (while slowly driving them mad, of course).

I don't think people outside of newspapers (and a whole lot of people INSIDE newspers, too) can really appreciate what it takes to pull something like that off in such a short amount of time. But things like this happen every day, at newspapers all over the country. Well done, Tom.