Mourn ya ‘til I join ya, my brothers:
As newspapers lose money and readers, they have been shedding great swaths of expensive expertise. They have been forced to shrink or eliminate the multiply [SIC!] dundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism from what you find on TV, radio and much of the Web. Copy editors are being bought out or forced out; they are dying and not being replaced.
Webby doesn’t necessarily mean sloppy, of course, and online news operations will shine with all the brilliance that the journalists who create them can bring. But in that world of the perpetual present tense — post it now, fix it later, update constantly — old-time, persnickety editing may be a luxury in which only a few large news operations will indulge. It will be an artisanal product, like monastery honey and wooden yachts.
It would be nice, at least, to thank the copy editors on the way out. But after visiting the Newseum, I know what I have suspected for a few years: if newspaper copy editors vanish from the earth, no one is going to notice.
I just spent a week with about 70 aspiring journalists and did not meet one person who said he wanted to be a copy editor. Copy editing has for generations provided a professional home for those nerds among nerds, the deeply nerdy who lack the math chops to make it as programmers or engineers. They (we) gravitated to copy editing the way otherwise unemployable cranks with eccentric facial hair are drawn to the Postal Service. Where will innumerate nerds go now? I suppose you don’t need all that much in the way of higher geekery to work as a website designer.
But people will notice, every time they ask themselves “Who writes this junk?”
UPDATE: As a reader points out, that typo in the first quoted paragraph, which is now SIC’d, is darned funny, given the context.