So, has anyone noticed?

so solid.

 

The paper south of me...we've seen so many errors in it since about this time last year that I sometimes think they've stopped caring.

Not to say my paper doesn't do it's damage. Right now there's only three of us in the newsroom (normally four, but one is sick) and the three that are doing layout will end up checking each other's pages. And we still won't catch everything. But we don't f--- up headlines.

The paper down south makes glaring mistakes like misspellings in headlines and forgetting to replace the sample text with whatever is supposed to be there. It's incredible.

 

a couple papers I know - on the mid- to mid-major size - have sacrificed deadline rather than editing. that should be interesting when the bosses come down on them.

 

The local metro has had this problem for months at least. An untrained eye would just mark it down to mistakes, but you can tell where the desk is straining and the seams are beginning to show. And this goes beyond typos to things like improperly labeled jumps, press releases that get run straight through without style editing, a tranpostation columnist who is nothing more than a shill for the state DOT, etc.

 

Maybe they should try the Michael Phelps 6,000 calories for breakfast diet.

 

My holy shit moment came a week or so ago.

Flying back from vacation in Hawaii (Aloha, bitches!), spent two nights with the mustardparents in Virginia. Total number of staff byline stories in those two Virginian-Pilot sports sections: FIVE. One a column and one a big-ass fishing report package. Centerpiece story each day was wire. Absolutely blew my mind.

Back to your original post, though. It wasn't the lack of quality I noticed. It was the woeful lack of quantity.

 

Metro here hasn't sunk. The early deadline editions have always been bad, but that's because they don't care and never have.
The late/city final has been its normal self, but this metro is one of the few to have reported circulation gains in the last ABC report.

 

Local paper, name of which I will PM to you and which cut 100 people across the board a month ago, shit the bed in their sports section last Thursday AM.

Seven copy-editing errors on the front page of sports, two on the second page, four on the main baseball page and one more on the page facing the baseball page. That last editing error was in a brief that was actually a repeat of an article that ran on the second sports page.

Unfortunately, they were having copy-editing problems before the layoffs. TV and local sports schedule listings were the usual culprits, although it also crept into copy.

 

I don't see the point. That missing word isn't bothering our profits. Pretty soon, this will be the norm, the reader will expect it and we can look for other areas to cut as the quality of the product slips further toward the gutter.

Sincerely,

Your average Newspaper CEO

 

Just yesterday, the paper in my hometown had a headline about "open mouth stores."

There were also a combined zero stories by staff writers in the sports section. All AP. And the lead story was an AP feature I read on Yahoo! two days before.

So, I'd say there's a "decline in quality" across the board ...

 

even minor things, like people blatantly not spellchecking a page (seriously, folks, this is a must-do before you send something off), are cropping up in this neck of the woods.

 

Not just typos and poor grammer, but dramatically diminished story telling. Stories with weak angles, or no angles.