Deadtree death throes...

A sad reminder of how newspapers are dying by droves and inches.  This atypical blunder from the LA Times.

As someone who previously worked in a professional publishing operation, though, this is actually fairly sad. It’s not that mistakes don’t happen; they always do. It’s not that they’ve had to cut back on the layers of proofreading that would have caught this early. It’s that this was a really glaring mistake. I think there’s a chance they knew about it before they went to press, but decided to print it like this anyway.

In an earlier era, the editorial folks would have said, “No way can you print it like this. We have to eat the cost of fixing it, or our reputation for competence will suffer horribly.” But if that conversation took place, apparently the editorial folks at the Times don’t have that kind of pull anymore. [More]

While my prose is often littered with errors, at least I can fall back on whining about being a one-man, unpaid band. When newspapers can't prevent this it's time for the Fourth Estate to make estate plans.