Copy Editors, You’re Jobs Are Safe?

CJR’s Regret the Error has an interesting piece up about tools that help news organizations avoid, and correct, errors.

Editz.com provides a simple way for readers of an online story to submit proposed corrections; its product, GooseGrade (which Editz.com tells us will soon be renamed to just Editz), sorts the proposed corrections and submits them to site editors for review. We just tested it on the same blog post that Craig Silverman tried it on. Seems slick, actually, and a better system than most newspapers currently have.

BiteSizeEdits.com is another crowdsourced editing app, but it’s for drafts, not published articles. (And it’s still in beta.) The idea is to chop up a draft into smaller pieces and give friends or acquaintances a crack at editing the text.

Last, a computer scientist thinks he’s developed a better spellchecker. He says that his technology “outperforms Microsoft Word significantly both in quality of proofreading and in speed.” But we fed it some really sloppy copy (like the headline of this post? Har har?) and it caught only six typos and ten false positives. CJR admits that the scientist is still fine-tuning his method, but for now, copy editors, these don’t pose much of a threat, so the spellcheckers that replace you will kinda suck.

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