Instant Gratification

The fact that writing something and publishing it has become an almost immediate process is going to kill me. For instance, I am currently typing this into a browser window, and Blogger is obediently saving it every few seconds because that's what it does now. I have no doubt that if enough people really wanted it, Blogger would implement a feature whereby typing into one's blog would be published in real time, so if you navigated (I like that word slightly better than surfed) to my blog as I was typing a new piece, you would see the words appear as if from the ether.

I'm not really worried about that; it hasn't happened yet for the simple reason that people still care enough about their work not to want to show it off before they've finished it. But it could happen. The problem, as I see it, is that there is no longer any editorial phase of publication, certainly not online.

For most things, that's not all that different. Sure, I could publish this post as soon as I'm done typing it, but I don't. I spellcheck it first, which is something most people, I suspect, do not do. Then I often read over what I've written quickly. Since this isn't The Washington Post and I'm not Dostoyevski (two random picks, trust me) I don't put much more effort into it. I could, of course, but it's small beans.

But take, for example, other online magazine/journal-type things. They are supposed to be professional. They are supposed to have editors. They're magazines for God's sake, and just because they happen to exist via the Internet rather than in print doesn't mean they should be any less serious. Or what about blogs written by columnists. Oftentimes those blogs should be taken as seriously as the column.

However, there are boneheaded mistakes made by people who should know better regularly, mistakes which any self-respecting editor should have caught and removed. I'm not talking about factual errors; I'm just talking about using "bare" when you mean "bear" for example. Boneheaded stuff. The fact that many websites have so many of these errors leads me to believe that they have no editorial process, that the rush to post content means that review is largely removed. If I'm wrong, then these sites need to hire new editors. But I bet I'm right.

And the biggest thing, which makes me wonder all the more whether any editor at all exists, is the fact that, unlike print, republication of online content is a snap. If I discover, three days or three years from now, that there is a typo in a book I've written, the most I can do is fix it in the next publication, if any. But if I find an error in something I've written in this blog, I can easily change it. It's like issuing patches for things you've written.

So there is no excuse for the level of boneheaded error that exists in large-scale online publications. If time cannot be taken before publication, the editors should scour the site after publication, finding and fixing the minor, picayune things which stand out like a sore thumb to readers and make them wonder about the professionalism of a site which can allow errors like that to be printed.

Or maybe I'm alone in this feeling. Maybe everyone else has decided that online publications should be held to a lower standard, that blogs should be filled with spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and shoddy typing, for no good reason. Maybe anyone who reads this will be convinced that I'm a ridiculous bean-counter. In that case, I guess my dreams of getting an editorial job are doomed.

And if you find mistakes here, feel free to point them out. I might even fix them. It's easy for me to do.