Bring On the Subs!

... sub-editors that is.

Am I the only one to bemoan the sad state of journalism these days? Every single major news site seems to be full of factually wrong content, badly written content and broken links. I don't know if the advent of Internet publishing meant the end of the art of sub-editing, but it really does seem like it. Yesterday I was looking at a picture on the Danish financial newspaper Borsen's lifestyle site and saw a chef carving up a duck. The caption had two spelling errors in it and stated that the picture was of the duck AND a fillet of beef. I could see many interesting things about the picture, but it would have been truly weird if there had been a steak in the picture as well - and sure enough there wasn't. Makes you wonder if somebody just hits the "publish" button without pausing for just a second to see what they have written. Simple errors like this really ought to be simple to catch and weed out, but I guess the pressure is now on the journalists to focus on quantity and speed in publishing - and now they are doing their own sub-editing (yeah, right) they really don't seem to care whether what they have written is wrong or right. It is all about getting it out there as quickly as possible. I just wish that somebody would start to introduce some measures of quality control again or it might be the slow and painful end of well written content and we'll soon find entire articles written in text speak.

What do you think? Are you also annoyed/concerned about the dropping standards of online (and off-line for that matter) journalism?