Valley News's front-page oopsie.

It seems that the New Hampshire-based Valley News managed to misspell its own title on its own masthead on Monday by appending a superfluous ‘s’. Quite impressive stuff and, rather extraordinarily, not spotted by anybody involved in the production process.

No doubt if I owned a newspaper, stuff like that woud be happening all the time. But perhaps that’s not surprising given that I come from the home of the Southport Visiter, consistently misspelled for 164 years, and read theguardian – a paper not best known for its spellchecker, and whose spaceless nonsense masthead has fascinated me since its introduction.

On a more serious note, with editors everywhere laying off subeditors, claiming that they are no longer relevant or necessary in the multimedia newsroom, could there be a more prominent, clear demonstration that the role is still vital?

Without subs, accuracy suffers, whether it be grammatical or factual. And in the ever-more competitive world, where the internet means that CP Scott’s maxim that “Comment is free, but facts are sacred” has never been more true, what do newspapers have on their side, if not accuracy?