Don’t Forget To Proofread

Barack Obama spoke in Dover, New Hampshire the other day, and since (a) that’s only one town over from me and (b) I wasn’t there, I was eager to read the local paper’s report on the event.

As I read through, I saw two instances where the reporter, Robert M. Cook, left a string of question marks (??????), which I saw as him missing his own notes to return and clarify a piece of information.

The best, though, was his parenthetical notes to himself in one of the final paragraphs:

[Obama] added that people who make less than $250,000 a year would not have to pay any additional (more than now? how does that help?) payroll taxes, federal income taxes or health insurance taxes.

The bold highlight is courtesy of yours truly.

Yes, folks, we’re deeply entrenched in the Internet age where a few minutes delay can make the difference between a popular article and one that is ignored by the masses, but do you really want to risk publishing something like this? Let’s hope it’s at least edited after-the-fact — that’s one benefit of the Internet, after all.

2 Responses to “Don’t Forget To Proofread”

  1. Dave Says:

    One of the things that is a staple of these tiresome “journalists vs bloggers” debates are the things journalists do that bloggers don’t or won’t or can’t. This typically includes things like fact checking, editing, proof-reading and such. However, at the same time the debate rages, it seems to me like all the virtues the big J Journalists tout as their advantage are in the decline in all the news I experience, print and online and TV. If you are going to claim that as your advantage, you really have to actually do that thing.

  2. Dave Says:

    One of the things that is a staple of these tiresome “journalists vs bloggers” debates are the things journalists do that bloggers don’t or won’t or can’t. This typically includes things like fact checking, editing, proof-reading and such. However, at the same time the debate rages, it seems to me like all the virtues the big J Journalists tout as their advantage are in the decline in all the news I experience, print and online and TV. If you are going to claim that as your advantage, you really have to actually do that thing.

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