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Introduction
Welcome to the Guild of Copy Editors' annual report for 2017. It has been another successful backlog-busting year at the Guild; our Blitzes and Drives have been popular, as has our Requests page. Your coordinators have also been active behind the scenes, helping the Guild to run smoothly.
Our regular backlog reduction drives and blitzes continue to keep the backlog trending downwards (see graph to right); albeit with a pronounced yo-yo pattern reflecting the every-other-month schedule of our drives. Much progress has been made this year; we started 2017 at 1,626. According to our monthly records, the level peaked at 1,871 in April, fell to 1,388 in May, bounced to 1,600, hit another low of 1,363 in July, rebounded to 1,575 then plummeted to break the thousand-mark with a new all-time low of 997 at the end of November.
Our week-long blitzes focused primarily (and successfully) on reducing the backlog on our copy-editing Requests page, with an excursion into biographies for a change of pace.
The Requests page was very popular, with 17% more editors submitting requests than the previous year. On April 17 the number of submissions per editor on the Requests page was reduced from 3 to 2, to ensure that more editors would have a fair chance of having a request fulfilled within a reasonable time. This measure had an immediate impact, and by the end of the year the number of pending requests had fallen from 75 to 13 and average wait times were reduced from 33 to 17 days.
| 2016 | 2017 | |
|---|---|---|
| January | 1,774 | 1,465 |
| February | 1,981 | 1,718 |
| March | 1,966 | 1,647 |
| April | 2,223 | 1,871 |
| May | 1,496 | 1,388 |
| June | 1,713 | 1,600 |
| July | 1,656 | 1,363 |
| August | 1,886 | 1,462 |
| September | 1,789 | 1,432 |
| October | 1,937 | 1,575 |
| November | 1,414 | 997 |
| December | 1,626 | 1,194 |