Haven’t read “Fewer Copy Editors, More Errors” by Andrew Alexander, Washington Post ombudsman? Check it out.
Little mistakes take a huge toll on credibility. A groundbreaking newspaper industry study on credibility a decade ago warned that “each misspelled word, bad apostrophe, garbled grammatical construction, weird cutline and mislabeled map erodes public confidence in a newspaper’s ability to get anything right.”
John McIntyre over at You Don’t Say comments. In a sort-of related post over at Language Log: How shall we spell copy editor? Copyeditor? Copy-editor?
Perhaps it was one mislabeled map too many that finally killed the newspaper industry rather than the interwebs, which usually get the blame.
Comment by David — July 17, 2009 @ 1:55 am |
It does seem obvious; I agree completely with the quote you gave here. I am always put off by finding careless errors in newspapers.
Comment by Grammarian — July 19, 2009 @ 12:54 am |