Craigslist was a gut punch to local journalism, but now the business is withering from attrition. Proofreading might be a lost art. I frequently circle the typos, the missing and extra and misspelled words and so on that escaped correction, and tell myself I’ll write about this dereliction of standards—once I have a bunch of them.
Well, now I do. And the sad thing is that they all appeared in one story—a thoughtful reflection last Sunday by Tribune drama critic Chris Jones on Hudson Yards, the massive new development in New York City. Jones’s fine story in no way deserved the carelessness it encountered. But newspapers no longer pay an eagle-eyed staff to keep up appearances.
• “[Hudson Yards] feels like a more compact version the Dubai Mall. . .”
• “. . . The Shed, billed as a ‘a new area center for the 21st century,’ a place that accommodates all creative disciplines and thus open and welcoming to everyone.”
•”. . . artists began realizing the power of neutral spaces, theaters that we’re literally built with particular shows in mind.”
• “If flexibility a freeing thing or do artists work better with confines of genre, time and space? How much do we want to stay the same? It’s all going to up for debate.”
• “Each store sucked you quietly into its brand; they are sponges, they do did not spill their energy in a public square.”
• “A problem faced by suburbs become all too clear at Hudson Yards.”
• “And Hudson Yards, or Lincoln Yards, or whatever comes next, are far from done.”
These aren’t egregious blemishes, merely small spots on a silk shirt that you can overlook if you really want to. Papers of old didn’t want to. Jones’s report appeared on the street last Saturday. I looked for it online Wednesday. About half the needed fixes had been made, “do did” not being one of them. Still, the Tribune had been more attentive than I expected. v