Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study tests the assumption that outsourcing copy editing harms accuracy. Authors content analyzed all corrected errors in five newspapers in a full year both before and after outsourcing of all copy editing (N = 3255), while controlling for newspapers’ circulation during the two-year period. Literature on media credibility informs the analyses. Five daily newspapers in the United States and Canada have outsourced all copy editing either to parent-company editing centers in other states or cities (Hartford Courant, CT; Raleigh News & Observer, NC; Winston-Salem Journal, NC; Daily Press, Newport News, VA) or a commercial firm external to the newspaper company but based in the same city (Toronto Star). Results are mixed but do not generally support the suppositions of some industry observers that outsourcing copy editing uniformly harms accuracy. The Daily Press experienced a significant increase in accuracy, that is, a fall in average daily corrections. Average corrections did rise significantly at the News & Observer, but were unchanged at the other newspapers. In terms of specific corrections, mathematical errors at the newspapers decreased after outsourcing, while visual and layout errors rose.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.264 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".