EL - I'm looking forward to your review as always, but it's getting more and more difficult to continue my subscription to a newspaper that doesn't care for quality. Please excuse me for going WAY off target, but no one answered the phones at the Sun offices and I have two glaring examples from this AM's Sunday edition.

Fred Rasmussen's article about John Eager Howard (page 21A): eighth paragraph, second sentence. Apparently the Sun doesn't employ proofreaders or the ones it does employ aren't smarter than fifth graders. I'll gladly submit my resume.

And, amazingly enough, the EDITORIAL about renegade tow truck drivers (page 22A). The writer claims that these drivers "charge as much as $1000 to release a car ... That's 100 times the legal rate for towers summoned to the scene by police." Math tells us that police-sanctioned towers therefore charge only $10! Clearly, summon fell asleep at the editorial wheel (or the calculator, or the fact-checking wheel, or the proofreading wheel). In a later paragraph, the correct charge of "$115 maximum" is mentioned, but that's no excuse for the blatant disregard for correctness.

These are not isolated instances. I see gross mistakes like this in almost every article I read - and on Sundays I read most of them.

And why did the copy editor choose to single out breakfast to headline today's review? As I recall you merely mentioned that it was a lovely, civilized place to have breakfast, on a porch staring at the woods. You gave no indication that you had actually experienced such an occasion.

Thanks for allowing me to vent. I only wish you wrote for the Washington Post.

Not to get in the middle of an argument about The Sun, but EL does say, in the third graf of her review:
"To me, the strength of Sanders' Corner has always been its breakfasts, preferably eaten on the porch."

So the headline doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Piano Rob: you missed another stupid mistake!

from: Phelps' opening race has U.S. revved up
Beyond that, not much phases him. He chatted with Peyton Manning for an hour... >>>

The uneducated reporter doesn't know the difference between phases and fazes.

Piano Rob and Susan WNAJ: You aren't reading carefully enough. How about the intersections of streets that don't intersect? The pathetic ignorance of Baltimore neighborhoods?
No, there haven't been proofreaders at The Sun for many years, except for classified ads. That burden fell on copy editors with the increased computerization. But don't beat on the copy editors. Their workload has become too much for a human being, even when computer assisted. Spell check goes only so far.
(Disclosure note for those who have not already guessed: I'm a disheartened alumnus, long retired but emotionally involved.)

while I was part of the group that helped redesigned the print version, I kinda liked it the way it was.

Now that I'm far away, I enjoy this electronic version much better. Even when I'm back in Charm City, about the only section I read is that new Sports (tabloid) thing.

Piano Rob wrote: "Thanks for allowing me to vent. I only wish you wrote for the Washington Post."

I agree the errors are getting more and more frequent lately, and reading the Sun (except dining reviews) has always been somewhat cringe-worthy. When you also read the Washington Post, the contrast can be downright painful.

But I don't want EL to write for the Post because then we would lose her And we need her here. They don't really cover Charm City much, and they won't give us home delivery. And Seitsema needs a job too! He rocks.

p.s. Why does a reporter need a copy editor to fix typos, etc.? When I turn in written work for my job, I don't have an editor, I proof it myself, and it doesn't have errors when I'm done proofing.

It seems to me it's the reporter's responsibility to proof what he or she writes. If your piece makes it to a copy editor with errors, you haven't done your job very well. I bet there are a lot of unemployed reporters out there who could turn in work without errors.

I had an English prof in college who said there is no such thing as typos, just errors in proofreading. (Shout out to Dr. Hahn at TSU! Thanks for a decent education).

Do the trolls in Chicago have any idea how much we do care about the Sun?

about the only section I read is that new Sports (tabloid) thing.

Ack! I hate the tabloid sports section! I stopped reading the sports section when it went tabloid.

Why does a reporter need a copy editor to fix typos, etc.?

While LJ may be superhuman, it's difficult for us ordinary humans to thoroughly proofread our own work. Our brains tend to see what we meant to write rather than what we actually did write.

Hey LJ - I had Dr. George Hahn for English at TSU as well. He trained me so well that I can write and proof drunk.

I remember the days in class when he thought no one had read the material and would slam his book down and yell at everyone to go home.

It was like English literature boot camp. But he produced competent readers, writers, and researchers who had enough pride in their work not to turn in anything with an error. That was one of the biggest sins. He considered it laziness.

Hal - what you wrote is very true - "it's difficult for us ordinary humans to thoroughly proofread our own work. Our brains tend to see what we meant to write rather than what we actually did write."

It's a problem, but if you focus, you can overcome it. Or, one way to deal with that issue is to read the words backwards, starting at the end, so that you don't have what you meant to say to guide you. Another way is to read it out loud.

There are many writers out there who can turn in something without mistakes. If you don't have a backup, such as an editor, perhaps you try harder. In my job, as in most jobs outside reporting, the writer is the end of the line. You have to get it right the first time, so you do.

LJ is correct though. There really should be no excuse for the drivel that spews out of the reporter's stories.
I do not have a college education, but I can write better than many who are college educated.
"Phases" for "fazes".
Stupid error. No excuse.

I agree with LJ - reporters are supposedly professional writers, and should have the advanced skills to turn in copy without errors. Perhaps 1% of the time something might slip through, but the incredible number of proofreading errorrs in the Sun lately is frightening.

Perhaps the Sun should call in old H. George Hahn, PhD from TSU for a little boot camp on being rigorous about your product. And it should start with the writers. The editors are a last resort, not the first line.

SWNAJ (and maybe should get one as a reporter) wrote: "I do not have a college education, but I can write better than many who are college educated. "Phases" for "fazes". Stupid error. No excuse."

Exactly. You never see those kinds of errors in the Post. In the Sun, however, there are several to many such errors daily, and more recently. Of course, the literacy rates in Charm City are way lower than those in the Metro DC area. You wouldn't think the Sun would actually cater to that, but maybe they think no one would notice.

Very sorry, EL, to beat up on your paper, but this is a sore point for a lot of people. USA Today, hell, even the East Baltimore Guide, comes out cleaner.

Piano Rob and SWNAJ, I couldn't agree more! The "product" coming out of Calvert Street is getting worse every day. Heaven forefend somebody should proofread copy--the amount of typos and factual errors grows almost daily. This is NOT the paper I worked for in the 60's and 70's! I'm a very good proofreader--did it for 25 years for deans, vice presidents, and researchers. I can surely proofread anything they can throw at me! How about it Sunpapers, want a proofreader?

And this morning half the comics are gone. Sheesh!

Let's face it, gang. In an age in which advertising has swung to a deluge of competing media, newspapers have had to cut back to stay solvent. Less pages, more typos and the disappearance of Rex Morgan, MD are among the results. But as someone who's been starting every morning with the paper since childhood --and still wander aimlessly through the house if it doesn't get here on time -- I'll take some pitiful proofing, garbled grammar and irrelevant headlines over nothing at all. Plus the fact that even after the unfortunate buyouts, the Sun still has some writers who are well worth reading --from Peter Schmuck on the sports side to music mavin Tim Smith to our own EL.

The East Baltimore Guide makes me cringe a lot more than the Sun does. Then again, their events section is pretty good.

I grew up reading a newspaper every morning, a globe at my elbow (so I could find those distant places). My parents taught that every civilized and educated person did this.

It took the Detroit newspaper strike to break me of that habit. I still miss it.

Now, the corporate owners of the Sun only care about profit (this is what you get when companies merge, not "economies of scale"). Here in the blogs, we're writing their content for free, and they are selling the advertising we avoid when we read it.

I'm a bit conflicted about doing this, but the sandbox is a lot of fun, and most of the other Sun blogs aren't worth the pixels they are painted on.

Media and how we get the news are changing. Anyone who thinks blogs will be the answer isn't reading them. 99.9% of them are sheer drivel. But I will mourn when newspapers die.

Standards aren't being lowered just here. I should have known that I could count on my favourite UK computer geek tabloid website to chime in on spelling.

My father wrote for the Sun, and even after he left, he freelanced for them for years. (FedHillJim - you know him!). We always got the morning, evening and Sunday papers, plus the old News American, the NY Times and the Wash Post, so I know from newspapers.

A lot of what I am seeing are careless errors, or mistakes made by people who don't know Baltimore. Recently, there were some articles about the Keswick & Roland Park business, and at the end, there was a link for more Baltimore COUNTY news. There is NO part of Roland Park in the county.

Oh God, it's going to get worse...

From wjz.com:

BALTIMORE (AP) The (Baltimore) Sun has announced it will have a new look, beginning Aug. 24.

The sports section will revert from a tabloid to a broadsheet, and daily editions will have three sections for news, features and sports. The news section will contain all local, world and business news.

Sunday editions will contain three core sections along with most of the current Sunday content.

The Baltimore Sun Media Group says in a news release the makeover is ''a reinvention of The Sun'' that will offer advertisers high-impact promotion opportunities and will complement readers' busy lives.

Editor Tim Franklin says news will be delivered in ''a more visually appealing way,'' making coverage more accessible.

The Sun is owned by Chicago-based Tribune Company.>>>

Susan WNAJ - What? Another "reinvention?" Oh, sure, let the advertisers run the paper. There was a time when ... aw, the heck with it. The Sun is lost; check out the bylines. Thankfully we have EL and Sessa ... but putting McCauley on several beats? Give me a break.

In the best of times, I think I've read an entire Sunday Sun in less than one hour. Now I only buy it for the coupons and EL's reviews (and the comics and business pages for the 16 y.o.). Reading a "real" paper like the NY Times makes one long for some substance that NY and DC have in their papers.

Editor Tim Franklin says news will be delivered in ''a more visually appealing way,'' making coverage more accessible. Okay, to convey information you can use words (Mr. Franklin, words are these oddly shaped black things) or pictures and cartoons, oh wait, the Sunpapapers no longer has a resident cartoonist so its more AP stories. I guess we can expect fewer words, news and information. The Sun's chances of future Pulitzers seems about as great as those of the MacPaper.

By the way, does 'more accessible' mean easier words? Easier words would certainly eliminate the phases/fazes problem. Those are difficult (okay, hard) words.

Sandboxers are missing the news, maybe because it's slow-moving, not fast-breaking. Real newspaper and newsmagazines died in 2001. The corpses are managed by beancounters forced to avoid employing competent people, and it's not the Sun, it's industry-wide. The Edwards case was cracked by the Enquirer, paying trash cash. Last week a Baltimore Examiner headline said something had become a stable instead of a staple. The real story is the industry had ample warning about news appetite decline, rising readership age, revenue siphoning by Craigslist, news cycle rev-up by cable news and instant, deep, broad and free web news--and knew it well--because they reported it. So what did Sun management do? Start stupid ventures like "b", raise prices, engage in costly graphic redesigns painstakingly studied by the Poynter Institute resulting mainly in mixing italic and standard headlines on a page, neglect building a full-service multimedia website like the Post's, infuriate veteran local reporters with anti-labor practices so they could replace them with rotating cheaper young staff from places like Hartford that didn't know Johns Hopkins has two s's, cut bureaus and made Mencken spin in his grave with dumbed-down coverage. The Sun is not alone in arrogance and failure of vision and execution. The LA Times editor refused to cut the newsroom yet again and was axed. Jason Blair made all aware the Times had taken its grey eye off the ball, concentrating on a new skyscraper monument instead. The Wall Street Journal prints press releases from the Murdoch family on its web news front. So now au courant news consumers can get more from a free My Yahoo set of local and global RSS feeds than from Hartford Courant youngsters at the Sun. Our only hope is Sam Zell becomes even more insolvent and sells to groups led by Robert Embry or Ted Venetoulis. So be glad we have even this shred of the glory days, and not another parking lot like the News American. So skip the copy edit criticism and support the skeleton while it still moves.
Where should we eat?

Gee Ms E, I really like the look of that Tuna dish.

There's a print edition of the Sun? Why?

You guys are too wrapped up in this idea that writing is some sort of sacred thing. Let it go. The more you hang onto to something primitive like writing, the more you hold yourself back. If we are ever going to develop into the wordless telepathic beings that we need to, we need to let go of structured language.

Devolution of language into gibberish is the best thing that could happen to humans. That way, we will have to use just our intuitive minds to communicate with each other on a more personal level.

The printed word has a false authority that deceives our minds. Let it go. In the future, only machines will need structured language and eventually they will make up their own. Writing is a spiritual crutch. Writing causes mental slavery to technology and alienation. How so? Writing is technology. Although I am not a fan, Aristotle nearly gets it right on this issue (Nicomachean Ethics Book VI). Heidegger explores the problems with Aristtle's techne in Die Frage nach der Technik. Kierkegaard adds to this argument also, but he doesn't realize it.

Writing is technology in the same way Euclidean geometry is. It's an invention of Man to be used as a tool - no different than a hammer or a cyclotron. Writing as a tool creates a false sense of objectivity. Tools are used to manipulate or substitute for Nature. This removes one by at least one step from Nature and is thus alienating. The more technology, the more alienation, which is dehumanizing.

So the Sun is dead, long live the Sun. Now death to writing altogether.

Boys and girls, that sure is a lot of hubbub about much ado. Things come and go throughout history. There are natural cycles. The history of newspapers is deeply rooted in ad sales and bad, even immoral, writing.

“You can crush a man with journalism.”
-- William Randolph Hearst

People prefer sensational garbage. Look at the mix of newspapers in London, New York or Paris. You can't force quality on them. The problem is that the Sun is circling the drain because it is unsensational stuff of falling quality, with some exceptions of quality. I don't think it can be all things to all people anymore. Anyway, didn't I always hear that newspapers were purposefully written at a sixth grade level to appeal to the steaming masses?

Tuna, oranges and capers? I'm not sure how I feel about that combo. I think the oranges and capers might clash.

Arf

terriermom -- did you mean to refer to the "teeming masses"? When I think of "steaming masses", it's something along the line of cow chips.

How absurb that you would compare journalism in the colonies to its superior version in the U.K., such as The Times.

OMG, who said nature was good? The Black Plague is all natural, but I don't want it.

I think Terrier makes a good point. Why bother with the pretense of objectivity when everything is subjective. In large European cities you buy the conservative paper, the tabloid/sportsy paper, the labor union paper or the socialist paper. Which one is valid? All? None? I prefer that media to wear their biases on their sleeves. If you want the Sun to succeed, turn it into a full-fledged tabloid with sensational headlines. Eventually the market will create something of quality for a smaller intelligent group. Of course that hasn't worked for local news, since it is 100% by illiterates for illiterates. Sales vs. quality seems to be a silly argument for a news-paper, since the Sun is losing both. New business models for local news are needed.

It was UK "journalism" that helped hammer US news into this sad state. A generation of royal-watcher sensationalist reporters and editors made its way here about fifteen years ago and helped TV news become the inverse of Cronkite, magazines more celebrity-drooling and broadsheets become tabloids, complete with contests and scantily-clad young women. Fox was not always like this. Rupert Murdoch is the biggest dog.

Nature is all we've got. Because of technology we have too many people now. Gas shortage? Nope, people excess. Food shortage - ditto. The Black Plague swept through Europe during its most miserable times. It wiped out 40-50% of the population. What happened next? The Renaissance.

"Steaming masses" was my attempt at a little joke and social commentary. Sorry.

OMG, I think that there are too many people because of an excess of a certain natural process, which could be done safely with the application of a little technology without adding to the glut of people.

Starvation is natural, and I'm not skipping dinner because it is.

Getting back to the food again, can't you just taste the contrasts between the acidic/sweet orange, the salty and slightly chewy caper, the unctuous fragrance of the olive, and the silky texture of the tuna? Mmmm.

Regarding the posts on the other subject; you don’t know how good you have it with the Sun. Here, in the Cincinnati area, the Gannett owned Enquirer has reduced content so much that it’s hardly substantial enough to swat a fly. The business section, (a separate section for how much longer?) the last three Saturdays has been 4 pages, one and half of advertising. They even eliminated their Gannett owned tech column.

And you can’t imagine what bad proofing is until you have seen their recent output.

Mc McIntyre, you left here at the right time, but thanks for the Empress Chili recipe. We tried it and liked it better than the local chains. It’s probably real food!

OMG, again with the Black Plague clearing the way to the Renaissance. I'm still not buying it! How about curling up with Charles Homer Haskins and the Renaissance of the 12th century for a bit of historical perspective? What the 15th century had was better publicity.

The Renaissance hit different countries at different times, just as the plague did. Last stop for the Plague: England. Last stop for the Renaissance: England. It is kind of weird. Haskins? Yeah, but that was different. I'm talking in broad terms about the more generally recognized term "Renaissance". I have this theory of old and new souls that needs my Plague/Renaissance idea.