Does anybody edit the Free Press?

So, I’ve never worked for a newspaper, or for that matter any publication. I’ll admit that. And I’m not an English major. I write a lot as a history major, but I don’t claim to be a grammatical authority. However, one would expect that the staff of a newspaper, say, like the McDaniel Free Press, would be populated with such experts. At the least, one would expect there would be one or two people on the staff who know how to break out the fine tooth grammar comb and knock out any errors that might exist in the articles written by staff reporters.

So why then is the McDaniel Free Press so chocked full of errors? I just read through the most recent issue and I counted 18 errors. (Bonus: can you find them!?) About half of them were pretty minor errors. A period instead of a comma. Awkward quotations. Or, speaking of that, the use of the word “quote” instead of “quotation.” These are all errors that might conceivably slip through the editing process if it was rushed. Not a huge deal. However, many of the errors seem to suggest that the articles were simply not edited at all. Not by the author, or by the editor.

The most egregious error by far was in the review of “A Doll’s House”. B r a d y E i s e n b e r g. Again, that’s Brady Eisenberg. The most important thing, by far, in a review of a piece of theater, is that the names of the actors are correctly reported. Did Zachery Brown play the role of Torvald? No, he did not. It was Brady. If the article had been edited, say, at all, that mistake would have been corrected. (It doesn’t help either that the article breaks lots of rules about theater reviews. For example, don’t say how the audience “felt”, and avoid flowery words like “stunning” “passionate” & “amazing” because they’re not actually descriptive.)

Also, can we say fuck in the paper? I didn’t know that. That’s pretty cool, I guess.

Maybe I’m just being a dick. I think that’s a distinct possibility. I really do. But how can we take pride in a school publication so riddled with errors? And it’s not as if this is a one time problem. It happens in every paper.

Solution? I don’t know. Edit better, I guess.