You may as well get used to mistakes like those in that headline. If the résumés and cover letters that have come across my desk in the past year are any indication, we, the print media, are doomed.
I have advertised four open editorial positions for my sports-related trade magazine in the past sixteen months. Every day during my search for qualified candidates, I'd open my mail with a quiver of excitement that this might be the day that a prospective editor would make it all the way through a two-paragraph cover letter without making errors that demonstrate a) a fundamental lack of knowledge of English or b) the kind of carelessness that you'd really rather not see in someone whose job is primarily to catch other people's errors.
You'd be astonished to learn how many were gone after the first sentence. One guy, the news editor and chief copy editor of his college paper, misspelled the name of the local newspaper in which we ran the ad. Another, a journalism grad who'd "had the opportunity to cover wrestling articles for our award-winning college newspaper," now asked me to "please accept my résumé and cover letter as an applicant for the editor/writer position." Another was a working writer who'd worked for a "Scripts-Howard" newspaper and was now free-lancing features. ("I got some very good interest from several of the weeklies which I did speak with," he wrote.)
Several journalists saved their worst for last. A journalism grad/ newspaper writer whose cover letter included thirteen punctuation errors ended it with this memorably penned flourish: "I thought that your company and me might make for a fairly close fit." Another, who had a B.S. in journalism and six years of editorial experience, wrote a great letter that unfortunately ended with a suggestion: "Let's get together and see if we a match." Sorry -- we not interested.
Then I had an epiphany -- I'd forget all about journalists and turn to the English majors, whose specialty is reading and comprehension and whose obsession is style. Bad move. It was here that I found a person with degrees in English and linguistics who promised "superb grammar, spelling, and puncuation skills." At least she didn't mention prooreading. Here I found yet another English grad who began his letter, "After finding your ad in the Wisconsin State Journal, please find my enclosed résumé." Found it.
If there's a bright spot in all this, it's that my candidates winnowed the field for me. An amazing three of every five I received failed their first test as editors -- although they didn't know they were being tested. And what of the clean letters? Since I know these could have been created by cover-letter software complete with spellcheck, I invited surviving candidates to come in and take an hour-long proofreading test that has roughly forty errors in spelling, punctuation, consistency, grammar, and redundancy. Four of five candidates scored below twenty. I also gave a quick ID quiz -- twenty names split between current sports and news events. Four of five candidates scored below six. The survivors of this round were given a writing assignment, which most failed.
I've been told by some colleagues, and some candidates, that my tests are too difficult. Really? Personally, I think the very least we can expect an editor or writer to be able to do is to distinguish between principals and principles, elicit and illicit, liable and libel, perspective and prospective, and council and counsel -- which, by the way, spellcheck can't do. I also think that someone who is reporting on events in the world -- even in the very small corner of the world covered by my magazine -- shouldn't mix up the tennis pro Yevgeny Kafelnikov (ID'ed by one candidate as the "prime minister of Russia") and Slobodan Milosevic ("Guy we were recently fighting -- Kuwait").
Whenever I get together with other curmudgeons -- and I'm only thirty-nine -- we never run out of people and institutions to blame for this sad state of affairs. There's the crappy educational system that pushes out graduate after graduate who can't spell. There are the journalism departments that teach students how to get the "who," "what," and "when" in their leads but fail to note the importance of reading to students' writing. There are the employers who have kept wages at 1960 levels through this time of prosperity, leading to a massive brain drain from the profession.
Whoever you might see fit to blame, publishers are getting desperate. How desperate? Recently, another local publisher hired away my assistant editor, who had a little more than two years of editorial experience, and inserted her right into the top slot at his new magazine -- without giving her an editing test. I suspect that if he had, and she again came up with the phrase, "schools must confront debates on recruitment in a new light," they'd have hired her anyway. After all, I did.
Andrew Cohen is the editor of Athletic Business, a monthly trade magazine based in Madison, Wisconsin.
