If you're a copy editor, this is a painful read

I doubt shoppers would notice if Wal-Mart employees started wearing the clothes before they sold them.

What's the "need" to not do that?

Readers won't care until you fuck up. Then they'll leave and never come back.

 

If you consistently put out shitty copy, after time you could post a million stories a day and no one would read them.

Every unedited story you put out there has the potential to completely destroy your credibility in one fell swoop.

 

Do you know this, or do you just think this?

The landscape of successful blogs and other Internet news ventures suggests you are not correct.

 

And, by the way, this sentence:

... is factually accurate because there is no website called "TechCruch." You dropped the "n," you fucking genius.

Now, explain to me why I should take anything else he says seriously.

 

Name me one of those that consistently puts out shitty copy while marketing itself as an "information source" that will be around in 5 years.

Deadspin, Buzzfeed and all of these other stupid sites are sources for entertainment, not news.

 

At Forbes.com, I'm paid solely based on traffic. I am my own copy editor. Fortunately, I have a day job so I don't feel compelled to chase traffic for its own sake, because I would be in an advanced state of depression. The timeless stories that I spend a long time crafting, getting the research and syntax and copy just right? Eh, when it comes to traffic. Crap that I slap up in 15 minutes that is timed perfectly to some very popular thing that just happened a few minutes ago? That's what is more likely to attract a lot of eyeballs.

Why is that? Because while I feel like I've cultivated a small and loyal audience (covering youth sports, which isn't covered by many on a national scale), I know that most of my eyeballs come from search engine, Google News or social media referrals. And for those, timing is EVERYTHING. If I miss the window by 15 minutes (too early or too late), I'm sunk. At that moment, people are looking for whatever they can on a certain subject, not whether it's copy-edited.

 

Maybe to you. To consumers? Not much difference.

But I did just go to TechCrunch, and their first article -- it didn't have a lot of errors, some small style stuff, but I found the lead story almost impossible to read because of the run-on sentences.

 

I agree with the argument that perfect grammar or AP style won't drive traffic.

But, again, that's not all copy editors do. On top of making sure everything is factually accurate, they also make stories more readable or more accessible.

I used to edit a Pulitzer Prize winner - he had the worst raw copy I've ever seen in my life. It was damn-near unintelligible at times.

 

If you're not dealing with the printed page the write-publish-edit model clearly makes more sense.

 

He's not talking about editing after posting. He's talking about not editing at all because "readers don't care."

 

The author can edit after posting, if needed. It's not that readers don't care. They do. But they care much much more about speed and getting the gist of the story conveyed to them.

 

Read the OP again.