This Sounds Like A Catch-22 Kiddies.

There is nothing worse than running a story and then having people send letters to the editor or make comments on the Web site about how moronic and uninformed you sound in a story that you put forth hours of time towards.  I should know, I've managed to be the only features writer in the history of features writers to receive not one but two letters to the editors complaining.

(SIDE NOTE: One was a story about the Puppy Store in the Mall, and well.. tempers run high when talking about animal cruelty.. plus it was terribly written.. I'll admit that.  The other was just an article on fashion and apparently the CU community is really averse to running stories that look like they should be in "Cosmo")

A copy editor's job is to check those errant facts to make sure that the publication, not just the writer, looks respectable. Yet, in the shrinking job market, these jobs are being cut out or outsourced..

The article we read for class brings up the bad aspects of outsourcing, which I feel greatly outweigh the good.

Still in a profit driven, capitalistic society, cutting costs and cutting jobs take precedent over accuracy.  In a column that ran in the Washington post, located here, Marc Fisher describes how and why copy editing is declining.

Like every other problem in the world, it seems to boil down to, on the most basic level, the internet.

Damn that internet for providing instantaneous access; for supplying the world with an even bigger marketplace of ideas; for taking away millions of jobs because everyone is their own editors online.

Fisher said his print articles pass through 12 hands, while his blog posts are sent straight online.    12:1, that is a pretty big ratio.  12 people have the opportunity to give their feedback, to find mistakes, to make changes.  Those are 12 people who have local experience, not outsourced.  Which article do you think is more accurate?

The more people you find to read your article with actual experience, the better it will become.  When you start moving the work to foreign countries, it adds nothing but frustration and errors. 

There is nothing more annoying than sitting on the phone with a computer company... oh Dell for instance.. and realizing that you have to put forth more effort to explain the problem that it is to actually have it.  By the end of those conversations, I want to throw my computer out of the window just so I don't have to ever deal with it again.

That is the product of outsourcing-- complete and utter frustration.  It's not because these people are useless, in fact they are probably more intelligent than me.  Rather, it's because it makes it hard to relate to them on a personal level and builds feelings of hostility because they are taking jobs away from Americans and making the unemployment rate skyrocket.

It seems that there is really nothing to be done though.  The internet has forced publications to lay off people, to downsize the need for copyeditors and rely on bloggers to correct their own work.  The product of this will be highly personalized, subjective 'articles' that give little more than personal opinion riddled with warped facts to prove their point.

After all, a pig is still a pig with lipstick.. or is it a bulldog..

Does it even matter anymore?