Anyone Can Proofread a Newspaper

With the crunch the newspaper industry has been facing, more and more errors are reaching their way to the printed editions of newspapers. This leads to subscribers feeling smarter and boosting their egos by finding errors in their favorite newspaper, but does it do anything else?

With newspapers caring less about comma splices and misspellings, are they also paying less attention to the details and the facts within the articles? Could newspapers be hurting their credibility by laying off the copyeditors they once employed?

Andrew Alexander, in the Washington Post, says that more readers have begin complaining because the misplaced modifiers have become annoying and are hurting the Post‘s credibility.

“To see such carelessness of the editing of one of our  most important and reliable news sources is concerning and disappointing,” said one reader.

Readers have complained about an increase in such errors in the past few months, according to Alexander.

Between early 2005 and mid-2008, the number of copyeditors the Post employed dropped from 75 to 43.  However, as the number of copyeditors has decreased, the daily duties for these people has increased. Copyeditors are now required to find links, locate keywords, and make the online articles search engine friendly.

What is your opinion about the increase of errors in many newspapers? Would you continue to see the value in the newspaper even though it had more errors, or would you prefer print or online only with less errors within each article?