IMO, since it’s a well known phrase, it shouldn’t be hyphenated, even when it’s functioning as a double modifier.
And for centuries, one of the characteristics of an ‘educated man’ was that he was able to tell the time of day by the position of the sun. But as clocks & pocket watches and wristwatches were introduce, this skill became meaningless. Nobody expects schools to teach it anymore.
In my high school science classes, we spent several days learning how to use a slide rule. By the time my younger brother was in high school, that had been eliminated – pocket calculators were now so cheap & common to have made it unneeded.
So is the same thing happening with rote memorization of spelling? Possibly. I notice that personally, on words that I frequently misspell, I no longer try very hard to remember the correct spelling – I just type it one way, and see if the spell checker flags it.
My sentiments exactly…does no one check the copy anymore? It used to be that you could rely on newspapers to use appropriate words , spell them correctly and use correct grammar. This practise educated the general public..but alas, no longer.
Well, they’ve downsized the comics and everything else, I suppose the next step was to downsize (Lay off) editors.
Sucks eggs!
Back in my newspaper days, my copy editor viewed my existence as a personal affront to her.
Pretty sure some of them barely bother to even look at the site they expect you to pay for. One of the big UK papers regularly features screwed up links for hours upon end, even for highlighted stories. My favorite is links to what I assume is their Intranet - hey it works for them so it’ll work for everyone right?
The simple reason for this is money, or the lack of it. I have been a newspaper subeditor for 12 years. When I started, our paper barely even had a website - at least not one that had live news on it. Even when we launched one, the subs (of whom there were far more than there are today) didn’t have anything to do with the website - that was the work of a whole other department.
But as circulation fell and advertising dried up, the budgets shrank year by year. At the same time as more people wanted to read news online, so the number of staff decreased. Today my department has about 40% fewer staff (and hardly any casual shifts to make up the shortfall any more) than we did when I joined, and not only are we subbing seven print sections instead of five, we also have to re-sub the copy for the website, for the iPad (in both landscape and portrait orientations) and now for a multitude of other tablets all with slightly different screen sizes.
And I think we do a hell of a good job considering the hundreds of thousands of words of copy that we deal with, several times over, every single week.
Yes, we charge for our online edition but we still take pride in accuracy. When you compare our site to something like the Daily Mail it’s a different world. The DM is free and it shows. Apparently nothing on that site is subbed. Picture captions seem to have been written by a school leaver who has barely skimmed the article in question. Whole chunks of copy are repeated. And so on and so on.
The latest development on my paper a new version of the iPad app. This is yet another “labour saving” thing, the back end of which is designed to flow copy automatically to any size of screen, on tablet or website. After the copy has been subbed for print we sub it once more for online and it will then, with minimal work, appear on all the myriad tablets. This means fewer subs needed and so, presumably, they will be able to make more people redundant.
Well, you can guess how well an automated copy flow system works. Not very well at all. Horrible widows, orphans, bad line breaks and other typographic horrors are rife. It is painful, as a sub, to see the result. I am used to spending a good amount of time turning lines, adding soft returns, removing widows and all the other things that make a page of text beautiful and legible. Now we have to let a computer shovel text onto a page. Thankfully so far they are not doing the same with print, but for how much longer will there still be a print version? But that is progress and who are we to stop it?
Readers hate it to, by all accounts, but nobody wants to pay enough for news to make it cost effective to have flawless copy these days.
(With apologies for any typos - this was written on my phone.)
Lets assume many of these reports are being written by younger folks. This is the generation that has more or less grown up having spelling checking as a constant tool.
I would submit that could make things worse rather than better. You never really learn learn how to spell because the computer has your back and when the computer screws you over you don’t even notice. I guess the same could be said for grammar correcting functions as well.
One could counter argue that these things would help because the computer is usually showing you the right way and it should sink in eventually. For folks that could be good spellers but just need edumacating that might be true. But, OTOH, such an environment could make poor/lazy spellers even worse.
So, you might or might not overall have an improvement in modern writing or news stories. But, when you get one of these lazy/poor spellers that have been propped up by the computer, when thier story goes out, particularly with out as much double checking as in the past, they really send out some glaring turds, which obviously get well noticed.
The other important thing to remember is just how much faster the pace of news is nowadays. In the past, stories went through whole teams of people and were fairly old news by the time they were printed. Nowadays, people want breaking news updated more or less instantly. Copy gets typed directly onto live web pages and made live immediately. Do you want the news NOW with typos, or tomorrow perfectly edited?
I nead too know whut Britely Spears is dueing nowe damit.
Anal:retentive should obviously be with a colon! 
Ah, the irony that this zombie thread was revived by someone who wasn’t observant enough to check its date, nor has any regard for proper punctuation.
Another example of why this is happening: