Being based in the small city of Cleveland, Tennessee, I could easily think myself a lesser freelance writer and editor than my peers in bigger cities known for bigger money and bigger publishers. But every once in a while, I’m reminded that the fine folks who edit even the largest national and international publications are nothing more than mere human beings.
Case in point:
Actually, let’s make it a couple cases in point. Because it’s getting bad.
I subscribe to a number of magazines for free. If you Google “Free magazine subscriptions” you can do it, too. And while I don’t always read them cover to cover, I’ve been finding more and more mistakes in them through just a cursory read.
Most recently, I found a handful of mistakes and inconsistencies in an article in SLAM magazine. Yes, you read right. In a single article. And since it was the first article I read in the issue, I shot a letter over to the editor. No response. Sent a letter to the managing editor. No response. Shot an e-mail to everyone I could find who worked with the magazine. Nothing. But not surprising. They have more important things to do. Especially if the only thing at stake is a misspelled word here and there, incorrect use of quotation marks, or a comma being used in the wrong place. Hey, it’s just a basketball magazine, so that kind of stuff doesn’t really matter anyway, right?
Well, I found even more mistakes in another magazine. One I thought had the same grammatical integrity as it attempts to have in its editorial content. The magazine? EBONY. Yeah, I’m a white guy in a tiny town known as Cleveland, Tennessee, but I’m a freelance writer and editor (Have I said that already?), so I try to read as much as possible in order to stay up on newsworthy topics and writing trends. And these mistakes were huge. There was no punctuation at the end of a sentence. Words were missing in the middle of a sentence. As with SLAM, this was the first article I read, so I shot off e-mails with the same (lack of) response.
What can be learned by this? If these two examples are any indication, the newest writing trend is to allow mistakes to permeate each story. Which makes my job much, much easier.
