ADVERTISING CONTENT CRYING FOR EDITORIAL CONTROL

In many Kenyan media outlets, the relationship between the newsroom and the sales or advertising department is either pretentiously rosy, or downright hostile. The management knows these two teams must co-exist, if the organisation is to stay afloat. Profit often takes precedence over public interest. Editorial control ought to also be exerted over advertising content.

The input of a copy editor is invaluable in ensuring news content is primed for publication or broadcasting, devoid of factual or grammatical errors.

In the above piece of advertising in a local daily, a second eye would have probably spotted the mistake.

Indeed, if the mandate of a revise editor was to be extended to the advertising copy, many ignominious blunders would be eliminated before they are a sniff way from getting published.

But there is just one small problem with the prescribed solution.

Even in their core duty of cleaning up journalistic content, copy/revise editors have been known to fail miserably.

How safe then is advertising content, if placed under editorial control?

It's easy to conclude the terror of errors, in the press, will continue to depress us.