January 21st, 2010
The Sun: Crumbling Toward Embarrassment
Perhaps you saw The Baltimore Sun this morning, with its lead story, “Ethics changes outlined for city.” Sun editors are probably hoping you stopped there, lest you read the sub-headline: “Rawlings-Blake says her bill will seek to heighte public trus’.” Now, I’m all for heighte-ing public trus’, I just wonder when the city with lengthe the schoo’ dayz?
All kidding aside, this is truly pathetic. The typos littering Sun stories in recent months have been one thing, but egregious mistakes such as these simply cannot be made on front-page headlines if a newspaper expects to be taken seriously. As a subscriber and diehard Sun booster—with many friends who work for the paper—it’s painful to point out errors like this, along with the general decline in the quality of our city’s newspaper of record.
But the pain is muted by anger: The Sun and its owners at The Tribune Company are largely to blame for the paper’s sorry state. Yes, the newspaper industry is suffering nationally, but the decision by management at The Sun and Tribune Company to respond by decimating the paper’s staff—including the virtual elimination of the copy editing department last April—are the direct cause of humiliating errors such as this one.
Management seems to have mistakenly calculated that it can keep the paper afloat by continually cutting back on writers and editors—the lifeblood of a newspaper—so long as it continues to crank out a product every day. If they continue to manage based on the that premise, the end is certainly nea
Click here to see our September cover story in The Sun’s sad descent.
11:04 am
Categories: Uncategorized
This is completely depressing. What would Mencken say?
Being a copy editor, I have to say that there’s something really weird about those typos. Most typos are caused by hitting a letter key next to the one you wanted, or not thinking hard enough about a tricky spelling or such. The look of the typos here makes me wonder whether there was a computer glitch. Our sorry operating systems (no matter which paper you work for) can have a “mini-stroke” while we’re typing something and swallow text or move a letter somewhere else. Hopefully this hed was fixed for the next edition (and that’s the big question: With few people able to check these things, many stories never get a second or third pair of eyes after the first edition, and that’s a bad thing).
There are loads of editing errors nowadays; I’m responsible for a few of them myself. Copy editors cannot always “do more with less,” contrary to some bosses’ opinion.
I used to work for a Tribune paper, and I assure you the people running Tribune these days simply don’t care about errors like these. They can’t get their minds around the fact that their readers still care about quality.
[...] going to have more on Tribune troubles in a week or so, but I had to link to this article from Baltimore Magazine. The Sun article had a mere ten words in the sub-head, and two had typos. That’s beyond pathetic. [...]
There is no need for copy editors in the Internet Age. People want a quick read, and if there is something questionable, a reader/blogger can fire off a response to be corrected within minutes by the Webmaster.
I can tell you for a fact, BJ, that that’s not how it works. First, you have to know how to reach the right people. There are the e-mail addresses published online, but if you want to reach the right people in a hurry, especially late at night or early in the morning, you have to use one of the addresses that only insiders know. No amount of googling is going to help you there. Second, unless you’re talking about something jarring like a misspelled headline, a web producer (they’re called web producers in the news business, not webmasters) is not going to step in. He or she will probably be too busy and might not have a journalism background in any event. (Many do, some don’t.) As for this being the Internet age, as much as I think print is an outmoded medium, the fact is that newspapers still make most of their money off the print product, and Internet revenue won’t surpass print revenue for another few years — if not longer.