After reading several articles last week about the lack of respect copy editors receive from their reporting counterparts, I can’t help but think about my own experiences at a paper.  While I can honestly say I’ve never been openly ridiculed/disrespected by any member of the staff, I feel as if many of my efforts go unnoticed and unappreciated.  There have been several times I have caught the misspelling of a name or the incorrect number used in a fact or statistic.   While I am glad I was there to catch to error, I can’t help but to think to myself: Are reporters getting lazy or are they just relying on the copy desk too much?

While the majority of stories I read contain few errors other than misuse of a comma, when a reporter misspells a first and last name, I can’t help but think they aren’t doing as good of a job as they should be.  A main tenet of reporting is to be accurate and a fact error on not one but two names makes me doubt the reporting abilities of the person.  So to get off my soap box: Don’t hate the copy desk.  We’re your last line of defense and while YOU personally may not have made an error in your last story, the reporter sitting next to you might have.