How many sub-editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
Sep 25th, 2007 by handolio
Writing online gives you the welcome opportunity to fix the kind of clangers that, were you in print, you’d be stuck with. On the other hand, changing stories that are already live can leave your readers with an insight into the editorial process that you might not have intended.
Spending a lot of time looking at BBC News, one tends to get the odd glimpse up Auntie’s skirts. I recently found myself wondering whether the corporation was monitoring social bookmarking sites, after it radically changed an embarrassingly gushing story some hours after it first appeared.
The thought resurfaced last week when I tagged the pictured article with an unfairly catty comment about sweeping up piles of soot from the floor. I wondered at the time how long it would take before the slip was noticed (hence the screen grab) - it was fixed within just a couple of hours.
I know there are legions of people out there who are in the habit of contacting the Beeb to point out mistakes, because most of my family have done so at least once. I still wonder, though, if a benefit to journalists of social bookmarking is that pedantic readers like me will do your final proof for you.
The answer:
One, and “light bulb” is two words.
Re “lightbulb”: In many cases, it’s actually just a matter of style. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that many words that began as two were shortened to one over time. It’s especially noticeable when you read Jane Austen, or other British writers of the past. I think in most cases two words become one as a way of saving space–newspapers are notorious for crunching words together. Eventually the one word becomes accepted. as if the two were always one word. Maybe now that we have endless space, in cyberspace that is, we can go back to the clearer and more elegant two-wordedness of phrases like any time or how ever.