The Ringer covers a guy – OCD, I should assume – that copyedits the The New York Times – just for giggles:
Anyone who followed @nyttypos that day soon got a feel for the flavor of its tweets. On October 19, @nyttypos spotted a “happened” instead of a “happen” in a story about Brexit; a missing space and a picture of three people captioned with five names in a story about TikTok clubs; a missing comma and a “statue” in place of a “statute” in a story about President Donald Trump’s attempt to host the G7 Summit at his own Doral resort; a subject-verb agreement error in a story about Venezuela’s water quality; a misplaced comma in a story about Bernie Sanders accepting an endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and a missing space between quotation marks and a quote in a story about Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Having myself been slimed by typos in a local newspaper story about students excelling at the PSATs in high school – I was the big shocker as I was a real slacker in school – as being named H Kenny White, I have a certain sympathy with this dude, whoever he is.
Still, this guy is a bit whacko. Before the copy-edit desk at TNYT was dissolved, it was manned by one hundred professionals. Now there’s just this guy.
When he corners his typo prey, @nyttypos typically screenshots the problematic passage and tags the author and/or any editors he believes may be responsible (or responsive). Although he could catch more typos with honey than with vinegar, his tweets tend toward acetic acid. “Functionally illiterate” is a go-to put-down. “It’s kind of a paradox in that if he just wants to fix the mistakes, he’s hurting his chances of doing so because reporters are probably tuning him out, maybe actually muting him or blocking him,” Bailey says. “But he’s probably building more of a following among random people on Twitter who like to see someone dunk on the Times about backward quotation marks.”
The article is more than just coverage of the dude, though. It also gives insight into TNYT. Fun!
