Once upon a time, there was an underappreciated yet vital person slaving away at your local newspaper. (We’ll save the “once upon a time, you had a local newspaper” lament for another time.) This person was the heart and soul of the newsroom, the bringer of sanity and restraint, the one who knew the difference between Qaddafi and Gadhafi and Gaddafi, the one person who actually knew every aspect of AP style without referring to the stylebook. The person who took the time to check facts and make sure names were spelled properly. The person who got things right.

We called this person “the copy editor.”

Today, it seems, this is a vanishing profession. For proof of this, one need look no further than to any of the Web sites (Yahoo! is a good example) that aggregate and repackage content from the various news organizations such as Reuters and the Associated Press. While in the old days, the faithful copy editor would bathe a reporter’s story in the clarifying astringent of grammatical and stylistic correctness before sending it off to be published, nowadays no such filter exists. More and more reporters are filing their stories “direct to the Web,” and while this might bring advantages in terms of immediacy and responsiveness, I would argue those advantages are nullified by the absence of the cool-headed copy editor and his or her pen, metonymically speaking.

It’s important to point out that this is about more than just correcting spelling and assuring subject-verb agreement. The copy editor is also the person who can adeptly take a two-paragraph breaking story and the next seven leads and write-throughs (okay, “writethrus” in journalistic parlance—and even The Nazi wouldn’t be such a stickler as to argue for “writes-through,” although that’s the correct plural) and in a matter of minutes craft a readable, clear story that’s free of self-contradiction. Without this skill, the hapless browser of Internet news is subjected in many cases to the raw stream of consciousness of a reporter filing a breaking story as it happens, replete with all the errors of style and content that we resign ourselves to countenance in exchange for the all-important virtue of immediacy.

Perhaps the most egregious and troubling development comes not from the Yahoos of the world, where we might expect and even tolerate this sort of laxity, but from the online editions of the print newspapers themselves. Most will freely admit that they simply aren’t staffed to have their online content copy-edited in addition to the print content—and thus opt for the lesser of two evils, copy-editing the print content while leaving the online content to founder in a sea of binary grammatical detritus. My personal favorites are those stories that contain things like, “The river is expected to crest by Tuesday night, Johnson said”—and then you realize that nowhere else in the story is Mr. Johnson referenced, nor are his full name and title ever used. Really bolsters credibility, doesn’t it?

Sadly, I’m not sure how to encourage more young people to go into a profession that doesn’t pay well in the first place and that now isn’t even particularly valued in those places where it still does exist. For my part, I shall miss those erstwhile guardians of the language—but I shall continue the fight in their memory.