Is there an editor in the room?

When the writing is so trite you can't help but notice, especially with two cliches in one sentence up high, in a story peppered with them:

"The lack of those planes—which many airlines purchased to be their new workhorse of the skies—adds further pressure to carriers and customers at a time when the air travel system traditionally operates at full throttle."

 

Come on, you know there are no more editors. At least, not any that actually touch copy.

 

Blue font for the thread title?

 

A few obvious fact errors in a recent ESPN feature tells me that even big shops are cutting copy editors. Apparently no longer just a Gannett thing.

 

Editing on ESPN.com has gotten very lax. Even its big feature yesterday -- on the Lakers' organizational chaos -- needed another good edit.

 

Editing everywhere has become very lax. We see a lot of major metros and sites making very embarrassing errors.

But the suits see editors (or, in Gannett parlance, "producers") as being unnecessary fluff because they're not creating content. A lot of the suits consider the newsroom an expense and a liability, not the driver of the product.

Editors are like good referees - you don't notice them if they're doing their jobs. But you miss them once there's a screw-up. Especially with most places going with young and cheap writers who haven't really had the opportunity to pay their dues at a smaller shop (and make mistakes under a less watchful eye) before getting to a major metro/national website, egregious mistakes and bad writing are much more likely to be published.

 

At our local Gannett shop, I've been told that there are days (even Saturdays, for the Sunday paper), where there are zero editors (producers) in the newsroom. It's a case where the low-paid, mostly low-experienced writers put their stuff in the system, the Design Studio people from 500 miles away throw it on a page, and everyone waits to see how it comes out in print.

 

Waits with baited or bated breath?

 

There are fewer editors, period.

A lot of them aren't any good, either. The grammatical shit is bad enough. Editors apparently no longer challenge shitty theses, either. I must read 10-15 columns a week where my primary reaction is "Jesus, calm the fuck down with your rhetoric."