The buck has to stop with whoever owns the byline
By Leo Valiquette
Quality writing, whether it is for journalistic, marketing or public relations purposes, is too often considered a commodity service. For those of us who have experience with the community newspaper business, where editorial content (to quote a colleague of mine) has often been viewed by publishers as “the shit that keeps the ads from bumping together,” this was painfully evident long before the advent of the Internet content mill.
The question is whether our present-day age of real-time, on-demand news and information is driving this to an extreme and leading many writers to, either accidentally or intentionally, break those tenets of ethical writing most often talked about in the context of journalism.
To be frank, some forms of content are a commodity and can be pumped out far more quickly than others. Nor are all writers created equal. I have worked with no shortage of wordsmiths who, despite the fact that this is their profession, still agonize for hours to produce something on a deadline that will still read much better if they are granted a second crack at it the next day.
