Beth Blair daily upholds the power of copy editing in an arena where copy editing is not so well understood or valued.
Blair, editorial team leader for the national office of the Boy Scouts of America, is the winner of the 2009 American Copy Editors Society’s Robinson Prize. The award was announced Friday night at the banquet of ACES 14th national conference in Philadelphia.
Her work includes running the Scouts’ Media Studio, copy-editing the Eagletter magazine, which has a circulation of 120,000, copy editing in multimedia formats on deadline and working with a large range of people who are not trained journalists.
Robinson Prize committee chairman Alex Cruden said Blair is someone who was named to lead an editing staff at the same time that the staff was cut, and who was asked to train that staff as well as non-copy-editors to handle new roles under a major reorganization. And meanwhile: Don’t miss any deadlines.
“Colleagues say our winner routinely puts in 12-hour days and is ‘always willing to talk about different ways to do something or better ways to do it,’“ Cruden said. “(Blair) sees beyond the immediate paragraph or page or project to the finished product, and how it should fit into the mission of the entire organization.”
In the words of one colleague, Blair is “the driving force behind the standards that are applied throughout our building.”
“Beth McPherson Blair fully understands that the news for these young readers must be completely trustworthy,” Cruden said.
Blair’s work includes hands-on editing as well as leadership and coordination for publications and documents that affect every level of the organization, from 7-year-old Cub Scouts to the Venturing Scouts to the professional staff and adult volunteers of the Boy Scouts, an organization that plays a major role in educating and training young men in America.
She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism and English from Texas Tech University in Lubbock.
