Fast news reporting, slow editing
FOMO (fear of missing out) in our modern world drives news journalists to churn out news reports at lightning speed. The world wants to know as fast as possible about events: publishers want to beat the speed at which their competitors do the same. The public want to see the results of sports competitions really soon after the conclusion of the matches, and trawl for them on their mobile devices hungrily. That is the nature of the beast.
But this haste stands in the way of thorough editing. The news reports suffer as a result. There is no time to check that unnecessary words are eliminated, that duplication of words and sentences are avoided in paragraphs, and that reports are concise. The old-fashioned hard copy newspaper allowed a bit more time for refining the writing. But most of us look for electronic news today.
Spellchecks can help with avoiding spelling errors, and grammar checkers can improve grammatical correctness. These ensure that many of the errors made in hasty writing are corrected (and we all make errors when writing – we are only human, after all). But there is more to editing than checking spelling and grammar use.
I find it mildly annoying when reading electronic news to see the same phrases, and the same content slightly differently worded, repeated in several paragraphs. When I read news reports to my husband (not a fan of such apps on his phone), I skip whole sections of words, as previous paragraphs have already contained the same content.
Some news reports could also be streamlined and made easier for the reader to grasp, by shifting paragraphs around so that all the paragraphs pertaining to a particular theme are grouped together. It is distracting to the reader when some content is reported in, say, paragraph 2, and repeated in paragraph 5, with different material in between. Otherwise people ask themselves “but I have already read this a little while ago. Why am I reading it again?”
What is the answer? How do we marry the need for haste with the need to refine the writing? I don’t know. I just needed to vent my frustration at some of the irritation that comes with the convenience of our brave new electronic world.