The cardboard is hardly bare

Hey, d---head, did you read my post? I said I SUPPORTED the idea of writers being more accountable for their copy. I am a former copyeditor who understands the difficulties of the job, particularly writers who don't give a shit about what they turn it.

If you read the whole post, I said that notwithstanding writers being more careful, it still seems like a bad idea to have one fewer set of eyes seeing a story.

My post was pro-copyeditor.

By the way, when I called you a d---head, that's a cq

 

My problem -- and you've touched on it, yourself, EE94 -- is that any reporter worth their salt should have already checked all those types of things, anyway. And, assuming that, from the reporter's point of view, making them CQ every little thing in stories will take time away from them when they are pushing deadline.

Time-wise, it will probably cost them more than it would a copy editor, even on deadline, who is reading things with that understanding that a reporter has checked all those things that he/she really should be checking, anyway.

 

Reading the title of this thread, I thought it was referring to a growing number of poor journalists who now have to live out of cardboard boxes.

 

I've become VERY stubborn about writers getting the names right -- I only check names when they look weird. I think it's fair to put that on them.

But the Interwebs has made name-checking a lot easier than it used to be if you know which sites you can trust, too.

 

Not to mention phone books. Or yearbooks. Or archives. Or the paper's "list of names" which we have in an Excel document. It contains thousands of names spelled correctly.

 

That made me laugh really hard, especially if read really quickly after hank's post. Well done, Barsuk.

 

Cardboard IS spelled correctly.

 

I might mildly dispute the second part of this post.
I have found that checking oddly spelled names via search engines isn't always a sure thing.
An example is Olympic swimmer Aaron Piersol ... or is it Aaron Peirsol?
Google either spelling and you will get stories on him because there are a bunch of news sources that published items with it spelled wrong.
Hell, long before the Net, half the writers in the National League thought the Dodgers catcher was Steve Scioscia.

 

Well, that's why I wrote "which sites you can trust." ... It's definitely not an exactly science, and you have to doublecheck particularly on a name like Peirsol/Piersol, but if you use your head and don't go with the first reference that pops up but crosscheck, etc., I can get the name right 99.9 percent of the time when there's a doubt...

 

Absolutely.

 

I'm all for making reporters more accountable for what they turn in, but there's a reason papers employ copyeditors. The continued chops to copy desks are just ways for companies to save money and make changes it'll take the readers longer to notice. And when they do see the rise in stupid, stupid errors that would've been caught by one extra read ... well, that's just the writer's fault for not turning in perfect copy, isn't it? Of course, we could just outsource these copyediting jobs to India, where I'm sure colloquialisms and local names will be check properly...

 

Wouldn't you go to ... oh, I don't know ... the USA Swimming site to check that name?