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Comment by thinkingemote | Hacker News Reader

In mainstream journalism wasn't the practice to have a junior position research and confirm quotes, dates, proper names, etc?

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Those are exactly the types of jobs that have been disappearing for years (not because of AI, but because of Internet). Same with editors. I regularly see embarrassing typos in major publications.

Is anyone actually embarrassed by typos these days? It doesn't seem so judging by the quantity of them.

It is a very visible indicator of the quality of the whole. If the spelling is frequently not correct, which a reader can detect relatively easily, how many more mistakes are hidden in the content, which a reader can not detect easily? Are these completely independent variables? I do not think so. Therefore, I also assess the reliability of an article based on the frequency of careless mistakes.

What is an even larger warning sign, are cliches used to spice up an article. Ars Technica is hardly to blame here, but the Smithsonian magazine is full of it.

My mother[0] was a scientific editor, and she was brutal. She was a stickler for proper English, as well as content accuracy.

She once edited a book I wrote. It was humbling as hell, but it may be the only "perfect" thing that I've ever done (but it did not age well, and has since gone the way of the Dodo).

[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm

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