https://j-source.ca/article/copy-editors-laid-off-more-than-...
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/by-dismantlin...
Sadly, publishers 1) are competing with e.g. books self-published on Amazon, and 2) noticed that the mass market consuming those Amazon self-published efforts seems pretty OK with content that is full of typos and bad-quality typesetting, so why even bother any more?
It's no wonder more and more people don't care about virtually unedited published content. In addition to not caring, often times they don't even know the difference.
Which begs the question for me: what is it they say we're getting with all these standardized tests and the singular focus on teaching kids to pass those tests again? Because it seems to me we're about to have a populace doesn't read and can't write.
Copy editors do far more than people assume [1]:
> The dirty little secret of newspaper journalists is that a lot of them can't write very well. That's by no means universally true, but it's true enough. [...] I transformed some real trash into publishable writing, saved my paper and some writers from professional embarrassment, and introduced relatively few errors on my own.
And from the comments:
> Having worked at small, mid and metro newspapers, I can tell you reporters who can't write very well exist everywhere. When I first started working at a major metro, I thought all of the raw copy would be flawless. After all, these reporters were working at a metro daily. But there were plenty of reporters who really needed the old rewrite desk. Some reporters, of course, were very good writers But pity the poor reader if copy editors disappear.
[1] http://www.yelvington.com/content/07-08-2008/death-copy-edit...
I also think that there’s fewer pedants complaining in letters to the editor about these kinds of errors. And probably fewer editors paid to read any letters.
Finally, since any discussions I have with friends about the NYT turn into a tribal discussion, there’s a weird situation where people defend poor writing and editing because they are pro-NYT. So I tend to avoid, or at least not participate because they are so pointless and boring.