I spend a fair amount of time at a computer during my working hours, so obviously surfing and reading news articles are used to pass the time. Over the past couple years I have begun to notice that in many articles, there are either spelling errors, or word omissions that sometimes make the sentence incoherent. It strikes me as odd that many times a spell-check could solve these problems but was never utilized and allowed to go to “print”. Whats up with that? No more editors? An internet conspiracy to further degrade the literacy of the average English reader? It could be taken as a sign of the integrity of the source, or lack of it, but it seems to be fairly widespread, from MSN (I know) to Reuters, AP etc. Anyone else notice this?
Reduced budgets and staff across the board in print media, and therefore copy editors being stretched thin. People write tons of letters to the Washington Post every week (and they always print a few) complaining about the slide of editorial standards. Just yesterday I read an article with three errors.
Long time journalists being shown the door and replaced with scrubs straight out of college isn’t helping the matter, either.
Demand for stories that go out on the web instead of in the paper the next day could be a factor. Some places could be hiring fewer copy editors or other editors because they’re not making as much money from ads. There’s always the factor of trusting spell check too much, which can lead to homonym errors. And to some degree maybe the fine points of writing aren’t prioritized as much as they were.
No more middlemen. In (way) old days, reporters called their stories in to rewirters. The rewriters wrote up the facts and gave the story to a copy editor, who then gave it to the typesetter, who then gave the story to a proofreader whose job was specifically to check to mistakes. At the end, an editor placed the stories on a page and trimmed them to fit. And if a mistake did appear, there was usually a later edition to correct it, and many readers never saw the incorrect version.
That’s six people to catch (or make mistakes.) Today the reporter enters the story into a computer, an editor places and trims the stories (in small newspapers, it’s often the same person.) If it’s a good-sized newspaper, there will be another editor either at the middle or end of the process who actually reads the story, but that isn’t always a given. And many smaller newspapers only print one edition per day.
Spellchecks can help, but they’re lousy when it comes to catching a mistake in context. Of course, a spell-check can’t help at all with bad writing or editing.
The two biggest factors, I’d say –
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Tons of layoffs at old newspapers have hit the ranks of copy editors the hardest. So there are many fewer people checking stories for errors. Newer media outlets never had extensive copyediting staff in the first place.
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Pressure to put a story on the web as soon as possible gives copyeditors much less time to do their job properly. I believe the web and its accompanying pressure to put things up as fast as possible have had a devastating effect on the quality of journalism, both in substance (going up with rumors and little else just to get something up) and in quality factors like proofing.
In the old days (when I started in newspapering) the person who evolved into the position of copy editor got the job because he or she had not an ounce of creativity in his or her bones but was an obsessive-compulsive-anal nut job who saw spelling and grammatical errors as a personal afront (affront?). They also knew every date of note that had to be mentioned in the flag and knew every capital city in the world (and even those that had not existed in the last 200 years). You hated having to sit by any one of them at the paper’s Christmas party, and you dreaded your story having to go through them because they would cackle everytime they caught one of your errors. “Hey TV time, it’s, ‘lie in state’ not ‘lay in state’. I thought everyone knew that.”
You always sounded much more literate when the story got past them, however. Now that corporations own masses of papers and have gutted the papers to make the bottom line blacker, there are no “real” copy editors left. They were some of the first people to go. They tended to be rather cantankerous and corporate doesn’t like that.
It is also as IAmNotSpartacus says. Cheap untested rookies replacing people who care about the stories.
Another thing that irks me is these newspapers with web content that can’t get their links straight. The LA Times has a big problem with this. On their main page is a headline about the governator’s use of personal donations to fund travel. Yet the goofball that made the update didn’t link it to the proper story-- instead it’s going to a story about the Powerball winner.
And these guys think people will pay for online content… incredible!
It seems to me the OP is saying that these errors COULD be solved with spell check
For instance, he’s not saying that “their” is being spelled as “there” but “Their” is being spelled as “Thier”
And other such examples.
When I worked at my college newspaper and the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Web site (cleveland.com) in 2000, the Quark-to-HTML processing software was awful. As Webmaster at the college and intern at cleveland.com, I spent half of my day cleaning up the auto-generated stories and links after they’d been published online.
Granted, this was 10 years ago so I’m sure the software has improved tremendously, but I can still go on cleveland.com and see a lot of messiness that I know was created by the automation process.
Not saying that this software is responsible for shitty grammar or misspellings, but if you see missing words, missing sentences, dots and dashes in weird places or completely fucked-up links it’s probably a result of piss-poor automation and not having the money to pay people to clean it up once it’s been published.
There was a classic example from the UK Daily Mail recently. Evidently the Haiti earthquake was caused by the movement of “Teutonic plates”.
Two things I think:
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A serious lack in professionalism among journalists. These days I think they figure anyone who graduated the 8th grade can write and are cheaper than dedicated writers. I work for a business that does a good deal of journalistic work and me, not a journalist, constantly see rather bad use of grammar.
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The death of copy editors. Used to be there were a pile of editors along the way. Now, not so much. This thread reminds me of a Vanity Fair article where they put their literary editor, research department and copy editors have at Sarah Palin’s resignation speech. The results are quite humorous and goes to show the difference when you have good editors in place.
Nice analysis. Two comments:
affront (Yes, I was at one time a copyeditor! :p)
And the exception to the final sentence was of course Catherine the Great, who was laid in state. Many times. 
Craigslist in particular and the Internet in general. The former took the wind out of newspaper classified ad departments, a major source of revenue; the latter took readership and thus ad dollars. With shrinking revenue, papers are forced to cut back, and proofreaders get axed before reporters for reasons left as an exercise for the class.
Note that I’m not saying that reporters aren’t getting axed too. They are. When they remake SUPERMAN in 2015, the Daily Planet staff will actually BE just Lois, Clark, Jimmy, & Perry, like it seemed in the 50s series.
I’d add that as a generalization, people have always been more likely to think a copy editor is not needed. The reporter thinks he doesn’t make any mistakes; the production people see copy editing as “holding up” copy from going to press. Unless a senior editor emphasizes the importance of copy editing, everybody thinks they know better.
I’ve seen reporters and other"content generators" deliberately bypass the copy-editing step because “they don’t need it” when their submissions were full of Internet-gaming-site-level spelling and grammar…it was embarrassing.
Damn that German crockery!
Which is a perfect example of the kind of mistake that can be caused by putting a piece of text through the spellchecker and accepting everything blindly.
So, we’ve established that there are more errors?
Following the Montreal Canadiens’ upset of the Washington Capitals in Game 7 of this year’s Stanley Cup Playoffs, police forces in Montreal took to the street to try and prevent rioting, armed with riot shields and guns loaded with rubber pullets.
Or so reported the Montreal Gazette.
I guess the Gazette got a Pullet Surprise for that story.