Paper Monitor
11:00 UK time, Friday, 31 October 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
A long time ago there used to exist a class of person called a sub.
These people were easily identified. Glasses on string, stubble, tattered cardigan, irascible look. They were not sweet and joyous presences in the office, but they were a necessary evil.
They were the people who stopped youthful, thrusting reporters from making fools of themselves. They trampled on mixed metaphors, throttled tautology and remembered the difference between "phased" and "fazed". But most of all they worked to tackle the typo.
But one day along came "radical thinkers" who decided these whiskery dinosaurs were unnecessary in the Web 2.0 age and they unceremoniously applied the axe.
The result is everywhere in today's newspapers. Page 15 of the Independent, or The Inependent as it is tragically referred to, shows why.
Word also comes to our ears that the Daily Telegraph plans to run stories on its website that are not checked before publication, instead being "post-moderated" afterwards.
Soon the last bastion of typo-free text journalism will be the Daily Mail. Paper Monitor does remember seeing a mistake in it last year, but is reassured to think that the sub responsible was probably thrashed with birch twigs.
Away from editorial standards, you have to applaud Polly Toynbee's dogged determination in the Guardian. She's not a fan of Westfield, the nation's biggest inner-city shopping centre, but she braves the mobs to tour the retail labyrinth, describing it as "more Gatwick village than Liberty".
And she goes up to the toilet cleaners and security guards to check they are being paid a "London living wage". Turns out they are.
Typos in this edition of Paper Monitor should be sarcastically noted using the letters form on the right.
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