It staggers me that faults are written into newspaper headings. (I haven’t looked at whether they are carried over into digital media.)
Just the other day, The Age, a once-great newspaper, published a heading on its editorial page, the one on which its various editors are named, its opinions set in stone. Over a letter to the editor, the heading said: ‘We must start to properly funding tertiary education’.
Apart from the split infinitive, the ‘ing’ on the end of ‘funding’ struck like a dagger. In the paper’s proudest days, such a heading would never have been written, let alone published. Why? Because a human hand connected to a brain would have written it by hand on a slip of paper, a chief subeditor would have approved it, and a proof of the page on which it was due to appear would have been checked by ‘readers’ who were employed specifically to find and eliminate errors.
I suspect that these days, headings such as this one are written by several taps on a keyboard by a hurried so-called journalist somewhere in the world. And slips are a way of life. And no one checks for them.
To this day, ink-on-paper versions of newspapers remain the pinnacle of news media. Long may that continue. So what does it say about The Age, which allows such headings into print fewer than 10 centimetres from a list of the people who are supposed to prevent such things?