I’ve spent my entire journalism career — 22 years — working to uphold standards including accuracy and fairness. I love copy editing, and to see newspapers across the country hack away at it breaks my heart. We haven’t had a copy desk @Tennessean for a few years now.

Back then a copy editor would go down to the press room every night and grab a couple of dozen papers about 30 minutes after the presses started running and would hand them out so that the desk could look pages over. (Incidentally, we no longer have a local press room either.)

We never proofed ads, but we did sometimes catch problems with them, such as ones promoting events that had already happened. Or we’d make sure that news stories about a shooting weren’t on the same page as an ad about a gun show, for instance.

I still work at @tennessean, and I still believe in the importance of our mission. While I mostly copy edit stories, my title now is digital producer. My team has nothing to do with print besides proofing the front page, and I occasionally write print heds for the Sunday 1A CP.

It’s hard to see people on social media, many of whom are friends and former colleagues, take glee in our embarrassing print errors, such as a headline that misspelled the mayor’s name and another that referred to LEGO s—tting gears.

I’ve wanted to scream that it wasn’t my mistake. I’ve wanted to explain the lack of staffing and the abundance of work, but I’ve held my tongue. It’s not my place. But I can’t hold my tongue about the ad that ran in today’s paper. It’s a disgrace.

I don’t know if a copy desk would have caught it and stopped it before publication, but I guess we’ll never know.

This all comes two days after the company announced there will be more furloughs for employees, excluding reporters and photojournalists. I get it. The community desperately needs the content they produce.

But it was yet another reminder that editing isn’t valued much anymore. I feel like I’m contantly having to cheerlead the work I do, to the point of annoyance. No one knows my value unless I brag about catching someone else’s mistake, which is unprofessional and not cool.

This whole thread is to say that editing — and journalism in general — is needed now more than ever. We need more eyeballs on stories, more training, more people asking questions. It would be easy to not care, but I can’t. I love what we do too much.