I don't like to think of myself as a nitpicker. I do, however, cringe every time I see an easily avoided typo or misspelling in a reputable publication. I also like to ponder why it was missed - which is easier to determine in some cases than in others.
Today's installment comes from the Guardian, which has long been my paper of choice, with the New York Times a close second (and that sometimes more out of liberal loyalty than belief in its journalistic quality)
The headline is an interesting beast: "Ben Bernanke won't commit to fiurther Fed stimulus – US politics live." The simplest explanation for the mistake is that the letters I and U are right next to each other on a standard QWERTY keyboard, so whoever typed the headline accidentally added an extra vowel. Then, of course, no copy-editor caught the error.
Punctuation is worth another post, but I did want to share the below gem that I came across not five minutes after finding the "fiurther" fiasco. The subheading on an article about China's economic power in the supermarket reads as follows: "Within a generation China, is likely to replace the US as the biggest market in the world. We report from the heart of the consumer revolution []" (brackets mine). The missing period at the end of the second sentence is bad; the misplaced comma incorrectly dividing the first sentence's clauses is even worse.
What's most interesting to me as I revise my post is that, two days after I came across the articles and many days after their respective publication dates, nobody at the Guardian has
gone in to correct the error. Is the culprit (lack of) attention, time, or money? Is it proofreading a
casualty of our fast-paced new media environment? Do staffers need to
be paid more, or worked harder?In our fast-paced world of mutable media,
I would have expected someone to pounce on it right away and fix it,
with or without reference to the original mistake. Our mutable media makes it easy to cover over mistakes - so in the spirit of historical accuracy, maybe overlooked errors like these are actually good things.
In any case, I wonder if the Guardian is looking for web copy editors?
