What do our publishers think we are about ... ?

Yes, that is what their latest advert says about MEW.

Regards, Tim

Which ad, where?

Sounds like some minion made a cut and paste boo boo.

Odd as MEW does not really cover railway related stuff unlike ME which compared to EiM does have more loco/railway content, so if by best they mean most then yes it probably is.

Where is the Add

The phrase was being more appropriately used in 2021 :

**LINK**

https://www.classicmagazines.co.uk/promotion/ld3digital-ri?utm_campaign=stuck-at-home&utm_source=digital-title-RI&utm_medium=banner&utm_term=ld3digital-RI

MichaelG.

Thanks Michael, not taken the Railways Illustrated mag they use that description on but seems likely. Looking at ME and MEW can't see the same description being used.

Though a Pedant would say Classicmags are not the publishers

Edited By JasonB on 26/10/2022 07:31:08

All I did was put the phrase [within quotation marks] into Google and pick one of many results.

I have no knowledge of, or interest in, the magazine which uses that phrase as its ‘slogan’

MichaelG.

.

Pedants say all sorts of things

But did you look at the foot of the page that I linked ?

MichaelG.

It happens all the time in publishing these days, since proper proofreaders are a thing of the past.

Some graphic artist gets told to make up a quick ad/page/layout or whatever for something new. So they grab a similar old ad/page/layout file and use that as the impromptu template instead of starting from scratch. They usually change the copy and the pics to suit but sometimes they err and the old copy is left in place on the new layout.

It happens tediously often. I have seen newspapers with the previous day's day and date on the front page masthead as a result of the exact same manoeuvre by some kid graphic artist left unchecked.

I take it Hopper never read the 'Grauniad'!

More seriously is there any evidence for the assertion? I read a lot of old and new books and I'm not convinced. There have always been misprints, especially at the quick or cheap end of printing.

Dave

Nothing new there. The "Wicked Bible" published in 1631 encouraged its readers with the misprinted commandment "Thou shalt commit adultery".

John

Want some more strange stuff?

In issue 317, bottom left of the first page ("On the Editor's Bench" ) you can read:

This issue was published on June 17, 2022
The next issue will be on sale on July 22, 2022

These two lines are repeated in every issue since then. So they did the whole bunch in June?

Regards,
Hans

edit: deleted that dreaded smiley

Edited By Versaboss on 26/10/2022 15:11:28

The advert I described appeared in an email message sent out by the publishers on 25/10 with the heading:

No tricks, just TREATS! Subscribe from just £10!

If no-one else was sent the message, I can copy the whole thing for you, but I'm sure you'd rather I didn't.

I agree that the description applied to MEW was an error - indeed the same description was also applied to other titles. But it brings to mind an expression, as we have recently chaged proprietors, about frying pans and fires. i've always been a cynic.

Regards, Tim

Twenty-plus years working in the newspaper and magazine industry, including stints in various subediting and editor's roles. (Following a midlife career change out of engineering.) When I first started in the early 1990s there were layers of subeditors and check subeditors and senior subeditors that everything progressed through before going to the compositor's floor where they had their own proofreaders of the printing plates and later on the paste-ups that plates were made from in a photo etching machine. Yes, even still, errors sneaked through. But not too many.

In the 21st century as print industry revenue declined, they first got rid of all the compositors and proofreaders as the printing platemaking process was computerised. The subeditors in the editorial department simply hit a computer key and the aluminium printing plate came out of a machine next to the press and was installed unchecked onto the press.

Then they got rid of most of the sub-editors, having the reporters check their own work and write their own headlines etc. Page layouts were done by kids just out of college with a graphic design degree who were barely literate. They are notorious, in my repeated personal experience, for reusing old pages and layouts as impromptu templates and letting old copy through into the new page/item as per the ad Tim has seen.

Then check subeditors and senior subeditors were eliminated. Basic subediting was outsourced to remote contractors with no stake in the game. Pretty much it was left to the remaining editor him or herself to do all the final checking. The last newspaper I worked at in 2010 had a staff of about 200 people all up. Today it has 35. Not one subeditor among them. The impact on quality is very noticeable.

Book publishing has gone the same way. Former layers of editors, copy editors, compositors and printer's proofreaders have all been laid off. Authors are sent the galley proofs to check themselves, which is fraught with danger. Where I used to rarely see an error in a book I was reading, I would say these days it is unusual for me to read a book where I don't spot one or two errors at least.

And the internet side of publishing is the same free-for-all as the rest of the internet. All done by graphic artists, web-masters and self-appointed "content generators" with limited final checking. They do a pretty good job using computer spell checkers and AI grammar programs but some horrible clangers slip through almost continuously. Voice to text transcription software is the obvious culprit in many cases, with similar sounding wrong words making it through to the final page.

And yes, the Grauniad is certainly not immune, particularly to the voice-to-text clangers in recent times!

From long experience you cannot check your own work, you know what you meant it to say and so will not notice errors or ambiguities. The only exception is if you leave it aside for a while so you sort of forget what you meant, not really applicable to journalism, which is real time.

Yes self-checking is fraught with danger. You simply do not see your own errors -- and we all make them. But it saves money and that sadly is the name of the game in today's world.

Edited By Hopper on 27/10/2022 12:32:59