In amongst the mix-and-match of media I graze on, I used to buy and read The Times and The Sunday Times fairly often, until they started charging for the online versions, and I gave them up as a matter of principle.
However, as newspapers sometimes feature in the blog, I'd been wondering whether I should give the Times family the option to be included to maintain the balance; so I started to investigate the options. They were not impressive.
Bad
This is from the page where Times Newspapers Ltd sets out its wares:
Forty-three words, one unchecked typographical error and one misplaced comma: not a good score.
Badder
A read through yesterday's Sunday Times shows that misplaced commas are popular; perhaps it's a house style. There's an absent comma that the editor of the Letters page should certainly have inserted to prevent inappropriate hilarity arising when reading a sad missive on a serious topic. (In the interests of taste, I haven't harvested it or included it here.) It made me wonder, not for the first time, what exactly editors do these days. Even Wikipedia (citing the work of Alexander Mamishev and Sean Williams) accurately states that
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete work.
Key aspects are correctness and accuracy, which are frequently missing from the news media.
Baddest*
Yesterday's Sunday Times also published three corrections (reproduced here from p. 28 of the physical newspaper; the various errors had not made me rush to enter my credit card details to secure digital access…):
All three are details that could, and definitely should, have been verified before publication.
Overall, not very impressive, and I've read only the main newspaper so far. Going back to the products page, it's not even clear whether the delivered newspapers are put through the letterbox; the Sunday Times is now so huge that it seems scarcely possible. As we've seen, the weekly and Sunday papers are taken to 'you door', but the Times Literary Supplement, although much thinner than its Sunday relative, doesn't make it that far:**
Soggy supplement, anyone?
*Bad, usually spelt badde, badder and baddest were the medieval precursors of the modern bad, worse and worst. (See that great resource, the Middle English Dictionary, hosted by the University of Michigan, under badde.)
** It is, though, much more professional in its use of punctuation.
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