CCJ Traveling Curriculum trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. She blogs regularly here.

When I was working in daily print journalism, I had an ambivalent relationship with copy editors. It wasn’t love-hate; it was love-toleration. Usually, I thought of copy desk people as folks who justified their existence by asking tedious questions, usually right after I’d filed some important story right on deadline. I’d be thinking, now I can go home and maybe even eat something … and then the phone would ring. “It’s Brenda, on the copy desk. Are you sure about the way Mr. Doherty spells his name? Because I found another one in the phone book, and it’s spelled D-O-U-G-H-E-R-T-Y.” My theory was that the reason the copy desk was originally in a horseshoe shape was that it gave the desk as a whole a more or less 360-degree view, making it hard for reporters to sneak up on any one editor with a heavy object.

But there were also times when copy editors saved my butt. It was an alert copy editor who noticed that I’d used the expression “finger in the dike” to describe some dire situation that was threatening – only I’d spelled “dike” with a y. (Trust me: This is not a mistake Microsoft’s spellcheck will pick up.) When I quit daily journalism and started dealing with the world of book publishing, I discovered that the commercial publishing world considers copy editing to be a quaint relic, sort of like a Royal manual typewriter you’d keep in the office as a planter. The editors I encountered weren’t paid to actually edit manuscripts (though one or two of them did try); they were paid to be talent scouts, public relations agents and marketing wizards. And yet turning in a 300-page manuscript that had never undergone rigorous scrutiny by another pair of eyes scared the living daylights out of me. It wasn’t until then that I realized how much I’d taken copy editors for granted. All those times I’d verified, and double-checked, and then left for home with a clear conscience – because, I’d tell myself, if I missed anything, if anything looks funny, the copy desk will call. Oh, luxury. Would that it were still true.

Copy editors, you see, are now superfluous in the newspaper industry, too – or at least they are being thought of that way, which is another reflection of the massive societal  shift away from print. Even at newspapers, it seems silly to keep a copy editor around when people are writing things that go straight onto the Web and where any given story will be updated in another 45 minutes. And in a highly competitive news environment where every second counts, who has the time? At my local daily, the Washington Post, the number of copy editors has declined from 75 three years ago to 43 today, according to ombudsman Deborah Howell. Other papers are experimenting with more radical measures. The Orange County Register recently did a one-month trial of outsourcing its copy editing to a firm in India, which sounds like a gag Jon Stewart would come up with but isn’t. (The logical end to this outsourcing craze, of course, is outsourcing the job of reading the paper, too.)

Perhaps not coincidentally, I’ve noticed in the Post in the past year or so a noticeable decline in the homely art of correct spelling and grammar, as well as mistakes of the sort that indicate something was given only a quick run through a computer (a reference, say, to “wetting the appetite” instead of “whetting”). I’ve also noticed more stories in the back pages of the Metro section that leave obvious questions unanswered. And the Saturday morning “Free for All” letters to the editor section is now a must-read, because Post readers are unusually erudite; if a reporter makes a mistake in describing the Pythagorean theorem, at least a dozen readers will write in to point it out.

And that’s the way we seem to be going, as my colleague Jon Margolis pointed out last week on the larger issue of verification. Just as the old paradigm of “verify, then publish” has been replaced by “publish, and let the blogosphere sort it out” and encyclopedias have become Wikipedias compiled by consensus, so, too, are we all now expected to be our own language police. Language is a living, breathing thing, and I’m not opposed to the contributions the Internet has made to modern English. I think emoticons can be handy, as can shorthand expressions like BRB, OMW and OMG. (For one thing, they lessen your chances of walking into a light pole while texting.)

But here’s a funny thing: People do point out errors. They notice. The very fact that the blogosphere is supposed to be a self-correcting enterprise and that assertions attract such frenzies of attention tells you that at some point, on some issues, there’s still a true and a false, a correct and an incorrect. A small sidebar in the Post’s Sept. 4 convention coverage illustrates: A Post reporter was interviewing a self-described anti-abortion conservative blogger, Jill Stanek, who was extolling John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. The reporter asked Stanek what she made of the fact that Palin, whose teenage daughter is pregnant, recently cut funding for an Alaska program to benefit teen mothers. “I don’t think that’s true,” Stanek said. “I just started to read this morning that that’s a false assertion…” But, the reporter persisted, it is true. (And in fact the Post had published a copy of the budget page in question, with Palin’s intials next to the slashed items.) At which point, Stanek performed an adroit two-step and veered off to a slightly different topic.

A minor point, perhaps, but there are bigger ones; you can believe that man-made changes are not affecting the Earth’s temperature as fervently as you want, but your belief will not alter the evidence. And no doubt having rows and rows of copy editors on the payroll is no longer an economically viable way of achieving the highest levels of accuracy. (In fact, I know it’s not; in the old days, editing at the Post was often a Kafka-esque, cumbersome process that made you want to go outside and grind your forehead against the sidewalk, just for a comedic relief). But the fact that getting things right is no longer the exclusive province of the copy desk – God, I miss those guys! – doesn’t mean the job itself has disappeared.

It was always an open secret in newsrooms where I worked which reporters were solid and which ones weren’t, who was a flashy writer but not always completely thorough, who was good at cultivating sources and who was prone to being manipulated by them and, yes, even which reporters were apt to lard their stories with fiction. (The Janet Cookes and Jayson Blairs of this world always, always have deskmates, even if they can get by with fooling the boss for a little while.)

Now that the Internet is, in effect, one great big newsroom, these reputations will have to sort themselves out on a bigger scale, but it will happen. It has to. We already have Web sites like Snopes.com that people depend on for verifying or refuting various urban legends; there are Web sites devoted to truth-squadding political candidates and Web sites devoted to dissecting the latest advertising blitz. It may be that this sorting out will entail dividing Web sites into “those who get stuff first” and “those who get it right,” and that these labels will only occasionally overlap. Eventually, though, we will all know more or less who’s who. And at that point, those who get it right – whether it’s the NewYorkTimes.com or Marcia Smith’s Neighborhood Blog – will own an intangible asset that is like money in the bank.

Maybe those Web sites will then be able to use some of the tangible assets created by their hard-won reputation for accuracy to hire some staff. Perhaps by then, there will be some retired copy editors out there who will be willing to work cheap.