The Strib Gets a New Mommy

A front page article in today's paper declares that the Star Tribune will "exit Chapter 11" and will "emerge with new owners, lower costs and reduced debt". One wonders whether these new owners will bring with them a new business model--one that includes hiring better writers, observant proofreaders and competent fact-checkers.

The paper quotes the editor Nancy Barnes as saying that her staff should feel "proud" of their accomplishments, and I suppose they should be, considering that the paper reduced its workforce by 40%. That leaves a lot of work to be done by the people who are left over, so I suppose they deserve some slack for the little mistakes that appear here and there. But one person whose job it is to proofread articles should, theoretically, be able to catch things like "The Supreme Court has tickled weighty issues", and of the 779 people that the Strib laid off, they could have spared one or two of them to dedicate themselves to scanning the pages for errors. They could also get some poor, hapless, unpaid interns to do it, a couple of college kids who will do it for a few credits and a reference.

On the other hand, I'm beginning to wonder whether proofreading in general is on the decline. I'm currently reading "John Lennon: The Life," by Philip Norman, an 800 page tome that chronicles the life of John Lennon and borrows several passages from Norman's bestselling biography of the Beatles, "Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation", and I've noticed a few little mistakes in there too. For the most part, it's tiny things that pass through the sieve of spellcheck undetected--things like the word "of" appearing where the author meant "on"--the kind of things that require a human, and not computerized, brain.

The internet is to blame for some of this. The ability to publish a post or fire off an email instantly often gives us a tingle of excitement that causes us to forget that we need to stop and look over our work before we make it live. My college philosophy professor once told us to always proofread on hardcopy and with good reason--for some reason it it always easier to miss mistakes on screen that appear plainly on the printed page. I don't think there are many people who print out blog posts and proof them before posting--I certainly don't--but as technology progresses, we seem to be moving away from careful crafting of the printed word and more toward instant gratification. I like instant gratification as much as the next person--that's why I use iTunes and YouTube--but I still think that laziness should not supplant careful proofing.