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

I can buy this, but don't expect to make any money by repeatedly publishing mistakes, for however long they're published. You can correct as often and as quickly as you want, but you're still publishing mistake after mistake.

Also, with all due respect, if all I know of you is that you didn't get someone's name right (not YOU, but the royal you), I have no reason to trust that you got ANYTHING right. You botched the most easily verifiable fact in the entire story.

Finally, I've met a lot of reporters in my day. Not one of them would've been better off self-editing than being edited by me. Not a single one.

 

Yep. I got a guy's name wrong in a game story. I confess. I did it. I was in a hurry and went off memory rather than pulling the roster to verify. Know what else? Not one person wrote in swearing off me and my web site for it. I was plugged in to the readership, you see, and if they had I would have known. They didn't care if I got a guy's name wrong for the team I didn't cover. What they cared about was whether I knew why the star running back was in the doghouse, or whether I knew what the starting receiver's injury was. And I knew. And my readership grew. And my site profited.

 

"Copy editors' group says keep hiring copy editors"

I'm sure people notice. What the original link argued is that people don't care. And in that study, what is the impact on traffic or revenue of well-edited stories? That's the big question. And based on what sites are doing well and what sites aren't these days, the answer is ... painful.

 

You needlessly published an error. Any good copy editor could have prevented it. You can't argue that's a bad thing.

 

I'm not playing is it a good thing or a bad thing. I'm arguing that from a value perspective it is illogical to have copy editors for online journalism.

 

We'll have to disagree on that.

Online journalism is still journalism - it should be held to the same standard.

 

I just got a breaking news story on my phone from BBC News posted 23 minutes ago about the Ukrainian head of the armed forces being sacked that has a copy errors. In the 8th graf it says:

In the third to last graf it says:

Anyone who has been following knows the latter graf is correct and the former is not. Also, the first graf is poorly worded and doesn't make grammatical sense. I'm not uninstalling the BBC News App from my phone because it was still a really informative story.

 

The BBC has been around for almost 100 years. A little good will is to be expected based on its reputation formed over time. Far, far different from any one of a million Internet startups.

That still doesn't excuse shitty, incomprehensible sentences and contradictory "facts."

Just because you can get away with something doesn't mean it's right.

 

I read Charlie Pierce's Esquire blog most days and most days I see mistakes. If I go back and look at the post later in the day, sometimes those mistakes are fixed and sometimes they aren't.

It seems like that has become the internet model and that's certainly what it really means to unbolt or become digital first or whatever the fuck. Post first and fix later, assuming you do.

The internet isn't really permanent, like a print edition, so as long as it is right in print, everything will be fine.

Apropos of nothing, we hired a new copy editor/proofer at my place and she had let some silly typos through. The kind that make my head explode and ones, I assume, readers notice. An example, it was an Army canon to describe, you know, a cannon.

So I was sitting with her and explaining why she needed to catch those things and her response was she was there to improve the sentences and the writing, it was the reporters' job to get the spellings right.

If TechCrunch had copy editors like that, then no wonder.

 

I literally had the presses stopped when I noticed we had a photo of the wrong suspect on 1A in a story about in child molestation case. We had a picture of a man with a similar name who'd been arrested on suspicion of DUI but had the charges dropped.

Pure dumb luck on my part that I had read the story on our website when it was breaking that morning but less than a year later, *all* copy editors at that shop were laid off.

 

I read 20-30 tech blogs a day in Feedly, and the poor writing/editing does drive me nuts. I dropped a few from my feed because they were just too painful to read regularly.

If it's all about page views, why not just have some big-breasted blonde holding the latest and greatest gadget? That's gonna get a gillion hits.

 

Jesus Christ. Get over yourself.