Can newspapers afford quality anymore?

Is there such thing as maintaining face and credibility anymore?

The Baltimore Sun Times made an embarrassing flop this morning. I almost choked on my Cheerios upon reading the sub headline: "Rawlings-Blake says her bill will seek to heighte public trus’.” Now, I’m all for heighte-ing public trus’, I just wonder when the city with lengthe the schoo’ dayz?"

The pathetic part is, the Sun's stories have been littered with typos like these for months. According to the Baltimore Magazine, the Sun Times and Tribune Company's decision to "decimate the paper’s staff—including the virtual elimination of the copy editing department last April" —are the direct cause of the humiliating errors like this one.

Yes, The fragile state of the newspaper business has been evident, with the industry falling by almost 40 percent last year, according to Goldman Sach's analyst Peter Appert. It's a bleak economic environment for journalism; it's nothing new or unfathomable. Every news source is trying to cope with the encroaching Internet, the recession and cutting costs.

We’re reporters, damn it. Our journalism professor never told us that we had to be business-savvy.

I couldn't help but wonder: how much are companies working to retain quality control if profit-orientation seems to be the main concern?

With each business decision, these news wires are simply digging themselves into a deeper hole and fueling the fire to their own decay.

Andy Alexander, the Washington Post ombudsman also reveals the errors made on the Post, are not just due to copy-editor layoffs, but due to the copy-editors' new priorities of "search-engine optimization" on a paper's Web content:

That requires new skills and time-consuming additional duties. Separate online headlines must be written in a way that attracts attention on the Web. Links must be found, vetted and inserted into online stories...when readers click on those stories, it takes them back to The Post. That increases traffic to its Web site, which can boost online advertising.

Now that really bothers me. Although I'm all for the multiplatform in this day and age of heated media competition, I am fearful for the paper when their quality-controllers have to be more focused on selling their product, rather than smoothing out the kinks and retaining its own credibility and respect from readers.

But again, these actions are contradictory. Management tries to resuscitate the paper by continually downsizing the writers and editors department, the essential lifeline of their system. They are clearly stabbing themselves in the back when they chose profit over quality.