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A great answer to that question is supplied in this Q&A with Mary Norris, a copy editor with The New Yorker. I especially liked this bit:

Andy: What qualities make a person a good candidate for copy editing?

Mary: Self-doubt. It’s always good, before changing something, to stop and wonder if this is a mistake or if the writer did this for a reason. When you’ve read a piece five or more times, it is tempting to believe that it must be perfect, but you have to stay alert for anything you might have missed. Eternal vigilance! It also helps to have read widely (and well), and to have noticed, while you’re at it, how words are spelled. Of course you have to be attentive to details—you have to be a bit of a nitpicker yet be constructive in your nit-picking. You have to love language. And not be too proud to run spell-check.

Lots of other great insights in the interview as well, so do read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily.)

Obviously, Mary’s work differs radically from my own, even though we share the job title “copy editor.” For example, her week seems to consist of fine-tuning literary essays by celebrated authors during the eminently humane hours of 10-6.

In contrast, I’m pretty much shoveling copy non-stop from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., Sunday through Thursday. (Not that I’m bitter or anything.) I don’t necessarily mean “shoveling” in a bad way; after all, we are a daily newspaper and an around-the-clock website, so our “metabolism” (to steal a new-media buzzword I hate) is much faster than The New Yorker‘s. Online journalism will definitely get your adrenaline flowing, and I really do enjoy it. But sometimes I miss the days when I had the time to read a story twice, or more, to ensure near-perfection in every component. Those days, however, are never coming back, and I’ve made my peace with that.

Anyway, here’s how a typical workday shapes up for me. Try not to hyperventilate from the excitement.

Arrive at 3 p.m. Log on, scan the Lifeline Live entertainment-themed blog for things that need correcting, and jump in and make fixes. Perform a quick quality check of the wire stories that have been posted by our daytime Web producers. Scan the Life front for any glaring typos.

After about a half-hour of that, I dive into editing copy for the newspaper. Besides the usual fact-checking, grammar-fixing, headline-writing and page-proofing, this process now involves pre-formatting stories for Web posting — creating a URL, adding an SEO-friendly headline and writing a 140-character “brief” that, ideally, summarizes the story but differs from the lede.

As the pages are typeset, the stories automatically publish to the Web, thanks to the pre-formatting described above. But they still must be “enhanced.” Photos need to be attached, as well as links to other relevant content. “Enhancing” can be as simple as adding a picture, which takes maybe a minute, or as complex as turning a “charticle” into something that works online, which can take much, much longer.

There are frequent requests for the copy desk to edit online-only items — the text for stand-alone photo galleries or interactive pieces, for example. We handle those as they become available. Additionally, after the last daytime Web producer leaves around 7 p.m., I scan the wire for AP stories to publish to the website.

Finally, at the end of the night, I rearrange the Life front to highlight the fresh content that’s just been published. Recently, I’ve also been given the OK to craft the occasional blog post for Lifeline Live if any minor (or major) news breaks.

It’s a hectic job that’s changing constantly, and, yes, it’s often overwhelming. But copy editing is still deeply rewarding to me, and I can’t imagine doing anything else — even when the  job steers me into “unexpectedly absurd conversations.”

Gene Weingarten’s Washington Post column mourning the demise of old-school headline writing and mocking the machinations of search-engine optimization gets a lot right, starting with the hilarious, SEO-spoofing headline (“Gene Weingarten column mentions Lady Gaga”). But I think it also gets some things wrong.

Weingarten’s right, of course, that headlines written for the Web are frequently less interesting than those that go into the paper. They’re also much easier to find, and in an online world utterly dominated by search engines, if you can’t be found, you might as well not exist. Sad but true.

But where is the rule that forbids clever wordplay from hanging out with easily searchable key words?

Weingarten cites a Post headline about Conan O’Brien that read “Better never than late” in print but became “Conan O’Brien won’t give up ‘Tonight Show’ time slot to make room for Jay Leno” on the Web.

Obviously, that’s SEO overkill. But perhaps something like this might have worked: “Better never than late: Conan O’Brien won’t drop ‘Tonight Show’ slot for Jay Leno.” Or this: “Better never than late: Conan won’t drop ‘Tonight Show’ slot for Leno.” (Googlers would probably enter “Conan” and “Leno” instead of their full names.)

I understand Weingarten’s angst about the industry, and I appreciate the humor he uses to express it. Much like him, I often yearn for that simpler time when all we had to do was “get the paper out.” But those days are vanishing and will never return, and I’d rather spend my energy trying to figure out how to merge the craft of journalism’s past with the dynamism of its future.