Is there an editor in the room?

[goalmouth]

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."

 

[SoloFlyer]

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

 

[Tarheel316]

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

Blue font for the thread title?

 

[Tweener]

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.

 

[Fran Curci]

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

 

[crimsonace]

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.

 

[BurnsWhenIPee]

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.

 

[swingline]

Waits with baited or bated breath?

 

[Alma]

There are fewer editors, period.

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

 

[playthrough]

I'm starting to grudgingly make peace with typos. If I didn't, I'd have to give up reading virtually everything. I can't imagine the workloads that copy editors have now (well, the few copy editors that are left). You can tell because typos are often closer to the ends of stories -- almost as if someone takes a look at the top half to make sure there's nothing terrible, then crosses their fingers for the rest and moves on to something else.