LANG's three consolidated Southern California papers – The Daily News (DN), The Daily Breeze (Torrance) (TO) and the Long Beach Press-Telegram (PT) – daily put out common wire pages to fill out their A sections.
A Wire Editor position was created about nine months ago in the first reshuffle, with several staff theoretically working the wires every day, though recently it's been just one person doing the Wire Ed shift across the titles.
Note: The copy/design desks of TO and PT have been fully integrated in Torrance. The DN copy desk remains in Woodland Hills. The daily features/biz section is common, too, mainly produced out of Torrance.
Wire Ed's duties:
Pick wire stories to fill out as many common pages as allocated across the titles, including the common, recently redesigned “Briefings” page that opens the national/world section of each paper.
Design all wire pages, between two and about seven per paper per day, depending on papers' size.
Oversee editing of wire stories – undertaken daily by DN's copy desk, with TO/PT helping out if DN is short of staff -- and proofing of completed pages. Each paper's copy desk then reads the final proof, which then goes to the News Ed for signoff.
General
Wire Ed shifts rotate through three papers' staff. About six people are on the schedule.
Wire Ed checks with (common) Biz Ed/News Eds across titles to coordinate what stories are on local/A1/biz budgets. Wires are mainly national/international stories and/or any state stories a News Ed requests for inclusion.
Wire Eds will lay out a page with two or three stories then in many cases find a wire page in another title with similar ad stacks and copy the stories across. In the main, every paper will have the same wire stories, though obviously if the DN has eight wire pages and TO three, then TO won't get all the stories etc.
Wire Eds used to be the News Eds of each paper, but this has been discontinued. Mainly it is rimmers who undertake it now.
