All the news that's fit to print

Weirdly, for someone who worked as a copy editor, I get a strange pleasure when newspapers run mistakes. Even though that obnoxious motto from the New York Times--a paper I love--gives me enough reason, it really has to do with the medium becoming horribly outdated. Just think about it, the concept of having to wait a whole day to correct an error in itself, when you can do it in seconds on TV or online, is practically otherworldly. Adding insult to injury, newsrooms have slashed the number of copy editors, far more than in other departments, in order to cut costs, and with the advent of TV and the internet, they have had to increased the amount of content they have to produce. And so, mistakes like this happen. From today's San Francisco Chronicle:

In a story Friday about political fallout from Supervisor Chris Daly's public suggestion that Mayor Gavin Newsom used cocaine, a quotation from Daly -- "My numbers are already low. Now they'll hit rock bottom" -- was presented out of context, suggesting the supervisor thought the episode would damage his standing with voters. Daly made the comment after stating that he has never tried an illicit substance and intended it as a joke that having not used illicit substances might actually make him less popular in San Francisco.

Now, I'm not deriving any pleasure from a fellow copy editor's pain, especially since this sounds like a reporter's mistake. I know what copy editors have to go through, and I couldn't be paid enough to do it again. Plus, God knows this blog needs a copy editor--or an exorcist.

Plus, this is the kind of mistake that originates in the ingenious corporate strategy of making newspapers perform at 20 percent profit by continuing to cut costs and allowing quality to drop, milking the last few dollars off the industry, before it disappears from the face of the earth.