IN A report on 8 October, The Daily Telegraph’s science editor, Sarah Knapton, quotes Graeme Ackland, professor of computer simulation at the University of Edinburgh, as saying that “lockdown does mean that the number of deaths you save goes down, so there is a short-term gain, but it leads to long-term pain…”
Either Prof Ackland got his words muddled, or he is misreported, since the quote as it stands means that there is a gain if fewer people are saved from death – in other words, if more people die. Clearly, that cannot be what he meant.
Sympathy for Sarah Knapton may not be misplaced. Yes, you can argue that, in either event, she should have spotted the mistake. On the other hand, take into account that she is working without the benefit of that traditional safety-net every reporter relies on – a strong team of in-house sub-editors.
Three years ago, the Telegraph’s daily and Sunday titles suffered a devastating loss when about 20 subs were made redundant, their work outsourced to the Press Association (PA) news agency’s office in Howden, Yorkshire, about 190 miles from the paper’s London offices.
Distance matters, which is one of the things which makes remote subbing inherently problematic.
Good subbing matters because, without it, newspapers risk printing inaccuracies or – as the above example featuring the professor of computer simulation shows – sheer nonsense.
Allow either of those to happen too often, and a newspaper’s reliability and authority – and reputation – go out the window and, with it, to be generous, that publication’s invaluable contribution to keeping any given democracy fast flowing, not becalmed or stagnant.
In the traditional set-up, a sub-editor with a query on a story could stroll across the room to check with the reporter concerned. This is dramatically less likely to happen if, as is probable in the present case, sub and writer are unknown to each other and sitting in offices hundreds of miles apart.
None of this is necessarily to call into question the competence or commitment of PA subs. It’s just that, realistically, they won’t be bringing to the job the close investment of an established Telegraph staffer.
Of the sub-editors who lost their jobs, many were long-serving people who lived and breathed the Telegraph titles, and there was said to have been “absolute outrage” when staff got the news. The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) duly erupted. National organiser Laura Davison said: “Members will want to know why the management is prepared to take the risk of outsourcing subbing when other companies have tried it and the track record is one of abject failure.” Exactly so.
I point out the lockdown howler in a letter to the editor. Unsurprisingly, they don’t use it. How much better if they had.
Bronterre News 