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"Shamook is the one who “fixed” Luke Skywalker’s cameo in The Mandalorian to the tune of 1.9 million videos..." I understand this is a mistake, we all make the

"Shamook is the one who “fixed” Luke Skywalker’s cameo in The Mandalorian to the tune of 1.9 million videos..." I understand this is a mistake, we all make them, but where are the editors at The Verge? If a reader can find this with a cursory look-over, shouldn't they find it also? I couldn't have handed this in as a high school essay, so I'd imagine it wouldn't get past an editor at a large magazine. Maybe it's just me but at least from what I see personally there's loads of errors small and larger in the news these days. It's weird.

kungito 5y ago
From what I have heard, there is less and less money per article in the market. They hire college temps to write (copy paste from other websites) and no one checks the articles. They have to make sure that whatever has an article on the internet, they have a copy as well.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  It's the gig economy, moved to the internet. It's a race to the bottom as I said in another comment.
nathancahill 5y ago
Speed is king in the content/clicks game. It's easy to go back and edit afterwards. Hitting publish as fast as possible is the only way. Some "articles" are published as just headlines and fleshed out afterwards. Really interesting to watch on a Bloomberg terminal for example.
long_time_gone 5y ago
I wonder if journalists say the same thing about how often developers release software with bugs.
- easterncalculus 5y ago
  They should! Though there are more people that can read English than those that can read code, not including when bugs exist outside of it.
wyldfire 5y ago
> Maybe it's just me but at least from what I see personally there's loads of errors small and larger in the news these days. It's weird. From what little I know about journalism (very little), editors at traditional media had a very opinionated stance about language and punctuation. It is to the degree that they're not merely finding errors like these, they're also suggesting rewrites for clarity, etc. I, too, notice many simple errors like these that make me think that editor must not be as valuable a role as it was in the past. As the cost of communication dropped toward zero, an editor role becomes a more significant cost, maybe. Would the cumulative effect of errors like this one be enough to impact the readership of The Verge?
- easterncalculus 5y ago
  I definitely think the position has to have dropped in value, we're publishing more articles per day than before and most often online, in the land of instant corrections - there's no printing press to worry about. Though I would certainly appreciate if someone read them - there are plenty of independents, bloggers, etc that would catch this stuff in their own writing.
yreg 5y ago
I imagine you read plenty of "look-overs" without noticing them. I also imagine that the editors at (say) The Verge do find and fix plenty of mistakes that you wouldn't notice anyway. In this case there's a combination where they didn't notice and you did. Proofreading is difficult because your mind subsconsciously fixes the text you are processing. Editors need to focus hard, but as we all know it's tough to maintain focus while doing monotonous tasks.
- easterncalculus 5y ago
  Proofreading is definitely hard, I've made tons of mistakes just on this site. The reason I bring it up is because it is more than a technicality and in the first bit of the article. I would also imagine that editors miss things all the time, but I really think that if one read this it would have been caught. It's not a big problem, the meaning is still there, but it seems like a trend to me with online journalism at least, and I was wondering if others felt similarly or if I'm just being unfair.
  - yreg 5y ago
    I see. Some professional editor would have to chime in and tell us. :) I as an amateur have proofread texts for my friends many times and I often missed very visible mistakes. But it's not my job of course, maybe specialists have some methods beyond reading carefully.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
There's a lot of really low-effort articles written nowadays - maybe not so much for The Verge, but definitely for other platforms. They offer payment per word, and they can hire editors that also get paid per word of the article. But it's a race to the bottom, where people push to churn out as many articles as they can per day just to optimize income (or worse, to try and make ends meet).

kungito 5y ago

From what I have heard, there is less and less money per article in the market. They hire college temps to write (copy paste from other websites) and no one checks the articles. They have to make sure that whatever has an article on the internet, they have a copy as well.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
It's the gig economy, moved to the internet. It's a race to the bottom as I said in another comment.

nathancahill 5y ago

Speed is king in the content/clicks game. It's easy to go back and edit afterwards. Hitting publish as fast as possible is the only way. Some "articles" are published as just headlines and fleshed out afterwards. Really interesting to watch on a Bloomberg terminal for example.

long_time_gone 5y ago

I wonder if journalists say the same thing about how often developers release software with bugs.

easterncalculus 5y ago
They should! Though there are more people that can read English than those that can read code, not including when bugs exist outside of it.

wyldfire 5y ago

> Maybe it's just me but at least from what I see personally there's loads of errors small and larger in the news these days. It's weird. From what little I know about journalism (very little), editors at traditional media had a very opinionated stance about language and punctuation. It is to the degree that they're not merely finding errors like these, they're also suggesting rewrites for clarity, etc. I, too, notice many simple errors like these that make me think that editor must not be as valuable a role as it was in the past. As the cost of communication dropped toward zero, an editor role becomes a more significant cost, maybe. Would the cumulative effect of errors like this one be enough to impact the readership of The Verge?

easterncalculus 5y ago
I definitely think the position has to have dropped in value, we're publishing more articles per day than before and most often online, in the land of instant corrections - there's no printing press to worry about. Though I would certainly appreciate if someone read them - there are plenty of independents, bloggers, etc that would catch this stuff in their own writing.

yreg 5y ago

I imagine you read plenty of "look-overs" without noticing them. I also imagine that the editors at (say) The Verge do find and fix plenty of mistakes that you wouldn't notice anyway. In this case there's a combination where they didn't notice and you did. Proofreading is difficult because your mind subsconsciously fixes the text you are processing. Editors need to focus hard, but as we all know it's tough to maintain focus while doing monotonous tasks.

easterncalculus 5y ago
Proofreading is definitely hard, I've made tons of mistakes just on this site. The reason I bring it up is because it is more than a technicality and in the first bit of the article. I would also imagine that editors miss things all the time, but I really think that if one read this it would have been caught. It's not a big problem, the meaning is still there, but it seems like a trend to me with online journalism at least, and I was wondering if others felt similarly or if I'm just being unfair.
- yreg 5y ago
  I see. Some professional editor would have to chime in and tell us. :) I as an amateur have proofread texts for my friends many times and I often missed very visible mistakes. But it's not my job of course, maybe specialists have some methods beyond reading carefully.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

There's a lot of really low-effort articles written nowadays - maybe not so much for The Verge, but definitely for other platforms. They offer payment per word, and they can hire editors that also get paid per word of the article. But it's a race to the bottom, where people push to churn out as many articles as they can per day just to optimize income (or worse, to try and make ends meet).