I was reading an article about a gel-like substance discovered on the Moon, and came across this sentence:
The gel sample was a patch measuring 20 inches by 6 inches and resemble impact melt breccia, a type of rock that forms through an impact event, samples returned from the Apollo missions.
This wasn’t on Buzzfeed or some fly-by-night clickbait farm; it was freaking Newsweek, for crying out loud. How in the world does such an incoherent sentence make it to publication on the website of a (once-?) respected major national news magazine?
The economics of producing news content these days is dire. Cost-cutting is necessary because people don’t want to pay for content they can get for free elsewhere, and online advertising doesn’t produce enough revenue to keep a full-fledged news staff in morning coffee, let alone a living wage. That cost-cutting is likely to include paying for fewer, and possibly less skilled, editors.
I say this from the experience of being the former (now retired) employee of a once-proud daily newspaper, one that would have died 15 years ago if the owners had not cherished it and supported it with their deep pockets, until it could reach its current breaking-even condition.
You’re right, of course. It’s just a sad state of affairs.
Sometimes I think the writers themselves don’t even read what they’ve written before submitting. I’m guessing they are under added pressure to produce more and more content as well.
I’m hoping that we’re in one of those transitional periods and that news will settle onto a different but still profitable medium at some point. At one time I was hoping for the sort of digital/electronic news readers like they had in the movie Minority Report, with instant updates from the cloud, but now that seems unlikely. Or maybe we have witnessed the end of the heyday of quality news for a long time to come. The rise of 24-hour “news” channels (with 15 minutes of hard news for every 15 hours of commentary and opinion) and the death of newspapers certainly feels like the end of an era.
Newsweek isn’t what it used to be. IIRC they halted print publication and I think has become basically one of your better click-bait sites.
That quote is not well written, but not impossible to parse. I’m sure the original sentence was:
The gel sample was a patch measuring 20 inches by 6 inches and resemble impact melt breccia samples returned from the Apollo missions.
Oh, wait, they won’t know what the hell “melt breccia” is. Let’s insert a parenthetical phrase:
The gel sample was a patch measuring 20 inches by 6 inches and resemble impact melt breccia samples returned from the Apollo missions, a type of rock that forms through an impact event.
Wait a minute, my English teacher said to always put a modifying phrase closest to the thing it modifies:
The gel sample was a patch measuring 20 inches by 6 inches and resemble impact melt breccia, a type of rock that forms through an impact event, samples returned from the Apollo missions.
That’s it! Now, if I can get the number of the verb to match the noun…nah, time for lunch.
As someone who worked in or near the business his entire life, I can tell you it’s been going downhill for sometime. Newspapers haven’t had copy editors for years, few magazines have fact-checkers anymore, stories that might have gone through four layers before getting published now go through maybe two.