Waiving bye-bye

What happens when a typo makes it through and there aren't any readers to point it out?

 

Then it must have happened in my paper (rim shot).

I end up being the copy editor for most of the rest of the paper because the managing editor and I are the only ones on salary. No one else can stay as late as we do because they'll end up too close to or over 40 hours by the end of Thursday night. And after reading about five pages of other people's stuff, my eyes are ready to explode and I'm sure things slip through because I can no longer see them. I end up hoping others saw the typos before the stories went on the page and I concentrate on punctuation and cutlines and headlines.

 

Nothing like letting mistakes get in the copy to reinforce your standards for journalism.

Words matter. Mistakes matter. Every fucking one of them matters.

 

Of course they do. They also happen.

And I just think this is slightly different because the word in question remains a real, albeit wrong, word.

Take this from somebody who once misspelled "memento" on 1A of a major (well it was) metropolitan newspaper and it sailed through three editions, including copious proofing, before getting caught.

And Hank, no argument with one thing about this: As staffs are reduced, you're certainly right. This kind of thing will happen a lot more frequently.

 

i doubt anyone here believes it's ok for errors to get through to either the web site or the print product but it's the nature of the beast and a thread on a simple typo in a single paper is a bit overkill.

 

It'll be back next week.