20-Year Prospect

20-Year Prospect

We have sad news, friend: you are very soon to follow in the footsteps of the Javan tiger, the passenger pigeon, and the West African black rhino. Not you, literally, but your career. It's about to become extinct.

You're probably aware that newspapers are dying…at least, we hope you are. And, as these once-great bastions of journalism wither away, they're shedding the very people who are critical to the production of grammatically-correct, spelling-error free daily editions.

Between 2002 and 2012, the number of copy editors employed by newspapers decreased by almost half, which is why we've seen a rise in headlines like "County spelling bee postoned one more time" and "At Last singer Etta James dies at 73 after battle with leukaemia."

It isn't just the fall of newspapers that's killing copy editors, though. Technology has its hand in, too, what with the advent of electronic grammar and spelling checkers. All a harried reporter has to do is copy and paste a paragraph into a handy-dandy website like Grammarly and, bam, we have writing perfection.

Or do we? In fact, these copy editor replacements don't catch a wide variety of errors, including some simple spelling and grammar mistakes. This may warm the cockles of your heartof course there's no electronic substitute for a good copy editorbut, sorry, just because a program's buggy doesn’t mean your job is coming back.