That’s sort of my point. I’m not sure there are. But newsrooms aren’t doing a good job of finding them, and even when they do, the writers learn very quickly they can get away with a lot. That combination explains why we seem the same pattern of mistakes again and again and again.

Also, writers need to be self-editing. Many of them don’t do this. It’s a flaw that’s going to become more apparent, unless newspapers can improve their hiring processes, and I don’t think they have the skilled management or the selection procedures in place to change their ways.

None of this changes my original conclusion: Jim’s paper doesn’t seem to be hiring well. That sample is nowhere near the quality that should be expected from a professional writer.

It’s already worrisome that much of the metro Philadelphia market is convicting accused killers of murder in print and on-air. If there’s no vigilance against going to press with it, there’s nothing but paydays ahead for lawyers.

How certain are you — is anyone — that there are enough reporters with straight-to-publication writing skills to staff all the newsrooms, even with all the cutbacks?

Jim’s paper is small and out of the way; it doesn’t have the resources to compete with the 200K-plus papers for the error-free writers. Thus it’ll always need editors.

That’s the biggest problem here: Newspapers have not hired good writers. My biggest shock when I started editing long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away was how bad the copy was.

There’s no good excuse for misspelled words and glaring errors on a consistent basis. But writers know they can get away with it, so the problems continue.

I won’t argue that all stories need to be edited before they go on the Web — merely because that’s a battle already largely lost, not because it’s not the right thing to do. But I will argue that as soon as a story goes up, it should get a good scrubbing. In that way the imperatives of timeliness and cleanliness are satisfied, if a bit uneasily.

But what we’re mostly talking about are breaking-news stories early in the day with garbled proper nouns, sentence fragments, typos and the like. Are we saying readers are OK with seeing sloppy, amateurish writing … and are we saying readers think such writing is credible?

An example from my paper’s Web site just this morning:

“The city may cut loose some big money projects to slow the city’s sliding finances.

The cuts won’t be easy, and could make many iland residents — from senior citizens to soccer players — very unhappy.

The administration reccommended this week that the city cancel planned work on the senior center’s expansion, a new court and police facility, new soccer fields, bicycle lane construction and most of the other items on the 2008 capital facilities plan.”

I am painfully aware there are many, many alleged writers who cannot write and many alleged copy editors who either cannot or will not edit. Combining these two underperforming camps under the umbrella of “This is what we want” would be foolhardy.

Likely newspapers will use their usual strategy of waiting for that “one big mistake” to occur before they finally take any action with the person who can’t write a complete sentence or a headline. This will be catastrophic for any organization’s credibility.

Of course, what can we expect from an industry that still waits for that “eye-catching page” to attract readers by the hundreds of thousands?

“As Bennett implied, if your people are not good enough to write unedited, then they’re not good enough.” They’re not good enough; newspapers have refused to address the problem.

On the subject of reporters posting directly to a blog: It’s important for editors to recognize the new powers that online publishing offers to do more good editing. Now you can go back to a story to keep making it better. I get a little concerned that editors think only of what happens “before” publishing, when “before” and “after” publishing no longer applies.

If three, four or six (not to mention 12!) editors have to touch something, that’s a lot of eight-hour shifts, commutes into work, bodies that have to be in the building, just to get one thing online. Or, a reporter can see a question in the blog and just … answer it. Or a reporter might be live-blogging or twittering an event. See the Meranda Writes blog at http://merandawrites.com and the description of covering a campaign event with “18 online updates and one story for Tuesday’s deadwood edition” for the future of reporting.

There are so many new dimensions to reporting and editing now that aren’t imagined in the traditional, assembly-line process of putting ink on plates and plates to paper. Somebody could write a thesis on how long-ago technologies created the way we still do things.