Newspapers have always had issues with errors; it's part of being in a business where you have produce a new and complex product every 24 hours.
And when I say always, I mean, always. Perhaps you haven't read a lot of old newspapers, but I have, and there are errors galore. I think there are fewer errors now than there were in the past, if anything, because spellcheckers do catch a lot of them. I guess people didn't used to take pride in their work.
Sometimes they do. They also produce different editions of the newspaper--the one you get is often different than the one I get, for example--and not just the Neighborhood pages. But it's very expensive to stop the presses and do a completely new run, not to mention that it's hard to get the newspaper out on time when that happens, and those senior citizens are on the phone if their papers are one minute late.
Most of us DO make mistakes every single day; it's the relative importance of the mistakes that determine whether we keep our jobs or not. The sort of mistakes that get reporters fired are mistakes in reporting, not spelling, which seems to me to be the way it should be, since their job is to report the news.
No, they are called copyeditors or proofreaders, who have a very different role than editors do. I've held both jobs in different fields and I must confess that when I was working toward a close deadline and had multiple people handing me pages on many different subjects that had to be read and cleared (or not) immediately, I sometimes missed things. I even missed things sometimes when we weren't on a tight deadline. I even miss things in my own posts on this board. I don't think I've ever known anyone who hasn't. If you think you could do it perfectly every time, you should go for the job--they'd love to have you.
Different editions - yeah. I remember one time my paper said that somebody's death (Dale Jr.?) cast a "paul" over the race. Paul McCartney, Pope John Paul, I don't know..........
Boyfriend's paper in the city next door correctly had "pall". Weird.
Copy editor, fine, whatever, somebody is paid to catch things.
('Scuse us everyone else!!............)Just curious, when you worked at the DDN, was that downtown or on S. Main. Only asking because it is neat to have someone nearby who is familiar with the same things. My last 3 years at NCR were in the building where the DDN is now. Hated that building. And back in the 90's I actually offered to go to the DDN downtown to pick up application letters for a secretarial job (that I turned down) we ran an ad for in the paper. Going to a real newspaper office felt like it should be like on t.v. ha ha I wanted people to be running around waving paper and shouting about a big story or something. Rats.
I would LOVE to be a copy editor, proofreader, whatever. Too late now. I've actually looked. You have to have a degree in English and experience. I don't think being the editor of the company monthly newsletter (same place we hired a new secretary later) counts. Although, now that I think about it, even though it was only like 8 pages, I did EVERYTHING but set the copy. We had a graphic artist who did that. I assigned and collected articles, wrote articles, proofread everything, ordered working lunches, sent out memos - all while doing letters, memos, reports, photo mounting, binding, filing and answering phones for a bunch of engineers. We had a small "staff" who proofread, but I was the final edit. And every single word was spelled correctly and every single sentence made sense. (I still have all of them!)
At NCR, in one department, we did one newsletter. Of course, I was the editor - mostly because there wasn't enough interest. I typed and set the whole thing in Word. I used to take it home every night and proofread each new thing I put in. It was February and I had a little box with a clip art heart and Happy Valentine's Day on the front page. The day I was finally done, I gave it to the secretary in the cube next to me to look at. The first thing she said was that I left the apostrophe out of "Valentine's". Geez!!!!
Done reminiscing..............
Anyway, maybe the DDN should hire the whiny retired senior citizens, especially former secretaries, to be COPY editors. They'd be cheap because they could only make so much to supplement their social security. And they have the education and experience to do the job correctly.
Demise of the locally-owned newspapers/media. Actually 
Printing a whole other page is a pretty huge failure. Even our pressmen used to proofread and would occasionally catch things.
. I was a graduate teaching assistant at the time and my fellow TAs used to call and ask annoying questions.
Well, and pretty much everything else. Like I said, there was a lot of turmoil. I hate working in places where everyone is angry.
