Saturday, January 9, 2010

Bad news all around

A friend concerned about print newspapers and what appears to be their impending demise sends along the URL for a Columbia Journalism Review article that deals with the firing of copyeditors and the attempt to load their job on others in the newsroom.

The writer notes that accuracy is a problem for all media---it's just a particularly glaring one for print papers as they begin, intentionally or not, to shut down. The article can be found at http://www.cjr.org/regret_the_error/mission_quality_control.php

The problem is endemic. I edit technical articles these days and got an item back from a proofreader today. Camouflaging it slightly, there was a line that originally read: "This is an introduction to the native Whoozits content providers." The author had marked the proof, crossing out Whoozits and adding a note that "Whoozits is redundant." So the proofreader changed the sentence to "This is an introduction to the native redundant content providers."

Sigh.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

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