I worked as a copy editor/proofreader in the advertising department of the Rochester Post-Bulletin in 1988-89, going over display ads and auction/boxed ads that ran in the classified section. While proofreading fit my nitpicky/detail oriented self, it was the first time I got paid for it. It was a neat time with a fun group of people - the paper had only recently switched over to computer typesetting for the ads, so the old guys putting them together still grumbled about how the old way was better.
After about a year I moved to the city desk assistant position in the newsroom - that was a lot of writing obituaries, rewriting news releases for filler stories, helping customers who had items for the newsroom, and (my favorite) going through the archives to find local items for the This Day In History feature.
After about a year of that I moved up to an actual copy editor for two weekly publications the paper printed, Agri-News and Successful Business. That’s where I edited stories, worked with reporters to clarify parts of their articles, wrote headlines and photo captions, and started to learn page layout. I got hired by the FAA not long after that, and that was the end of my newspaper career. But I still catch misspelled words a lot - it’s really bad with the on-screen titles and graphics of just about every local TV station, especially on the weekends (but the national networks aren’t perfect either!).