Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Does the New York Times edit its financial articles?

This NYT article's first paragraph needs work:

The Federal Reserve upended the expectations of the financial markets Wednesday and shares .
Yes, there's a space before the period. And the sentence doesn't make grammatical sense.

Here's the article's headline:
the
That's it — just a lone, enigmatic "the."

Economics of Contempt says on Twitter:
Well, this NYT headline certainly wins the award for brevity. Not the most *exciting* headline ever though
How can I trust the content of an article if I can tell no one read it before it was published?

4 comments:

Jason (the commenter) said...

How can I trust the content of an article if I can tell no one read it before it was published?

I see your point, but you should be skeptical of any article you read, proofread or not.

John Althouse Cohen said...

I see your point, but I would like to be able to have a certain level of trust when reading an august paper like the New York Times.

Sarah E. Burton said...

This much we can agree on: it is disappointing when we find mistakes in newspapers with wide readerships. That said, I find many more mistakes on papers' online editions than I do their print editions, which unfortunately leads me to believe that the Internet has heralded some new era of lowered editing standards.

John Althouse Cohen said...

Actually, if I had to say, I'd say the opposite: print editions seem more poorly edited than the online editions. I've been reading the print editions of the NYT lately and noticing a lot of errors. They show up online too . . . but someone will usually, eventually get around to correcting them. You can correct a webpage that's already been published, but once the dead-tree edition has gone out, it'll stay that way (unless the error is caught early enough to correct it in a late edition of the paper, but I'll bet that's quite rare).

Example: I originally read this Charles Blow column in the paper edition said, and that webpage used to say:

This high-altitude bickering is a waste of time. You can’t fight in the clouds if you want to win on the ground.

The smarter tactic is to build excitement rather than sow discourse.


Well, what's wrong with sowing discourse?!

He meant "discord." That's now been fixed online.

People criticize the internet for being too "transitory," but the lack of permanence also means there's more flexibility to fix mistakes (including substantive problems, not just typos).