When a whiz kid in computer technology makes a goof

The new publishing technology is costly – not only in terms of financial prices but also in terms of the ease with which you can corrupt (and even lose) material through it. I did not know it until very late after ICT had come to general use in Kenya.

For 10 years after retiring from The Kenya Times in 1991, I had worked in the peripheries of journalism, stuck like glue to my manual typewriter. I owed my subsequent conversion to peer influence when I returned to daily newspaper work at the Nation 10 years ago.

Editorial director Wangethi Mwangi — who nearly 20 years earlier had been my most promising on-the-job sub-editor trainee — was heard to make the comment that “Philip Ochieng is by far the most technology-challenged member of the Nation Media Group.”

No, the remark did not hurt me – first, because I knew Wangethi could only mean it amiably and, secondly, because it was probably true.

For a long time -- like John McCain, who now aspires to the Oval Office -- I did not know how to use the e-mail technique.

Early in my career as an ICT user, I lost a lengthy book manuscript. Since then, I have lost other essential material irredeemably. One thing you could say about the manual typewriter is that it always insured you against such losses.

Yet high tech grows on you like a fungus. Once you sink into it, you marvel what a Neanderthal you were for all those years without it. How many things can you not do in the squeezing of a lemon -- things which took you donkey’s years to accomplish through the typewriter?

The saving grace is that even a high tech whiz kid can touch the wrong thingummy, thus corrupting the material so deeply as to cause damnation on earth. This week I was inundated with e-mail complaints that something was seriously wrong with my contribution here last Sunday.

Many letter which should have been capped were lower-cased. in english orthography, we must upper-case the first letters of all proper nouns – including all personal and place names – and at least one pronoun, the subjective “I”.

Though he is one of the most IT-skilled operatives in the Nation newsroom, a senior sub-editor accidentally touched something and thus “demoted” all sorts of literal characters.

The problem, I think, is that, because of the new tech, newspapers have abolished such offices as proof readers and “stone editors”.

As a result, nobody gave my piece the once-over on the page. That was the pity.

It flatters me whenever subs remark that my pieces are invariably “clean”. Yet it is dangerous to take any piece for granted even if the writer be Joseph Conrad or C.L.R. James.

For typos are not the only things you can arrest by going through copy with a tooth comb.

A sub-editor is a newspaper “gate-keeper”. It is his task to remove from copy all the political, linguistic and aesthetical improprieties according to the house stylebook and to his society’s sensitivities.