Dumb is good

Nothing crystallizes the growing battle between tradition and quality vs. profit and vapidity than this bit of drool by a full-of-himself techie named Abraham Hyatt:

Whatever you do, Vice, don't hire that copyeditor

Although he appears to have some experience in the field, he's clearly sold on the idea that revenue and profit are the only things that matter in digital journalism. That may be true for the profit-seekers, but there are still those of us who believe that quality is what counts in this business.

We also understand that "online audiences don’t notice the majority of the work a copyeditor does" because the only thing a good reader notices is when a copyeditor doesn't catch a mistake. It's like being a baseball umpire: the great ones are never noticed because they're doing the job well.

The Internet has enabled anybody with a computer connection to be a publisher. This has naturally degraded the quality of writing in general because so many people don't practice proper language skills. But good writing will always require proper sentence structure, solid punctuation, appropriate word choices, logical organization, facts that have been checked ... and all the other things that editors are responsible for.

Good writing is also good to read, which is the point. Sloppy writing? I'll leave that to Mr. Hyatt, who brags "the first thing I did was fire the copyeditors," and continues to write: "No one told us they came to our site because we had fewer typos than TechCruch."

If you didn't spot the typo, that's OK. A good copyeditor would have, and in the process protected whatever credibility that guy has remaining. But he's just interested in counting beans, anyway.