Words... Don't Come Easy

In the print media all stories (known as copy) is read by a (generally) more senior journalist called a subeditor.

Their role is to proofread the story and edit it for clarity and length before pouring the copy into the page layout.

Sometimes a subeditor can save a journalist from an embarassing error, other times the subeditor causes an error with injudicious cutting.

Other times there are journalists who are so precious that they don't like any of their story being 'hacked' and will resent the interference of a 'sub'.

Why the lesson in media relations?

It's to bring you up to speed on this remarkable story from the UK:

One of Britain’s leading restaurant critics has been left red faced after an obscene 1,000-word email rant he sent to his editors emerged on the internet.

Their crime? Changing a single word in one of his reviews.

Giles Coren, son of the humourist Alan Coren, was angry that his phrase “where to go for a nosh” had been replaced with “where to go for nosh”, with the penultimate word removed.

The change was made to the last line of his review of Cafe Boheme in Soho, published in The Times magazine in April this year.

The rant, with the expletives truncated, appears online.

Coren may be grammatically correct and possibly justified in being disappointed that his work was needlessly changed, but the limited vocabulary he used to voice his displeasure does him no credit as a writer.