Here's a sad but true story about the slow death of editing in our nation's newspapers.
When I'm not writing books my day job is as an editor for a major wire service. I spend my time trimming extraneous words, turning passives into actives, shortening sentences, unburying buried leads and generally making stories flow better, become more readable, more logical, more rigorous. If sourcing is insufficient, I insist on more sources. If a story is biased, I make it balanced. I also often catch errors. As any honest reporter or novelist will tell you, the world needs editors.Yet in our new Internet world, where everything is speed, where accuracy is not particularly valued, these skills seem ever less appreciated.
Call me old-fashioned but accuracy is more important than speed. There's no point being first with the story if you're also wrong. False information, even if traders can make money on it, is ultimately useless. I wish the world would realize this.

The newspaper industry, the business in which I have made a living for the past 30 years, is facing terrible times. Some believe it is in a death spiral. The New York Times was the latest industry bellwether to post a loss this week.
The problem is of course newspapers haven't figured out a way of competing with the Internet. Young people no longer buy newspapers -- they get their news free online. But advertising rates on the Internet are a fraction of what they are in the newspapers. As a result, circulation is falling, advertising rates are falling and newspapers are forced to cut costs. That means cutting staff, which results in a poorer product which in turn leads to falling circulation.
Add to that the recession and what you have is a short, medium and long-term crisis.
The Times saw advertising revenue fall 10.6 percent in the first quarter. Across the industry, newspaper ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year, the second-worst decline in more than half a century, according to the Newspaper Association of America. At the Tribune company which owns the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and many other venerable brands, things are dire.
What's sad about all this is we really need newspapers for the health of our democracy. Internet journalism and blogging do not replace the breadth and depth of coverage provided by the great newspapers in their heyday and still provided by The New York Times, Washington Post and a few others. What the blogosphere offers is lots of chatter, catty gossip, some niche reporting and much so-called analysis -- but little solid investigative reporting. We are becoming more and more a celebrity-driven society. Already, newspapers and TV have cut their foreign news coverage drastically, closing foreign bureaus, making us even more insular and ignorant of the world.
Of course there are positives about the Internet. It has made us reporters more accountable, we are more in touch with and responsive to our readers, it's made research easier and given everyone the ability to be heard. News is now much faster than ever before. I'm not suggesting going back. But we still need solid editorial standards, fact-checking, accuracy and accountability and the Internet does not provide those things. Above all, we need good investigative journalism which requires time, patience and lots of money. All of these things are in short supply nowadays.
Many, perhaps even most newspapers in the United States will not survive in their current form. They will become stripped down freebies given away at subway stations. The country will miss them once they're gone.