There are many reasons to love the Internet as a news medium — the immediacy, the global reach, the interactivity and the transparency. But clean copy is not one of them.

That is especially true of blogs like this one. Most of us bloggers post our copy online without a second glance, in part because of our rush to be first with the news and in part because copy editing can be a tedious chore. The end result is copy that often is grammatically incorrect, stylistically weak and plagued by typos.

We bloggers need good copy editors — or we need to be our own copy editors.

Alas, the way of the blog appears to be the way of print media in the information age, too. From Editors Weblog:

Media analysts and publishers alike have long debated the role of copy editors in today’s struggling industry. … Various models have been implemented, reducing the traditional three-step article writing process to just two, and thus doing away with [copy editors] entirely. Whilst the financial benefits are apparent, it does beggar the question … as to the effects of such a move on the actual quality of journalism — which, coupled with increasingly tighter deadlines, surely makes for a significant double threat … and something’s got to give.

That commentary came at the end of a piece about copy errors so abundant in a Washington Post sports story that some readers demanded a full refund for the day’s paper. “There is no excuse for such a shoddy product,” one reader wrote. “It’s completely unprofessional.”

Indeed it is.

The Internet has helped improve the quality of reporting in many cases and certainly has added perspective to today’s journalism that has been sorely lacking in news outlets dominated by liberals. But at the same time the Web has hurt the quality of writing.

Readers, many of whom long ago stopped caring about good grammar in their personal communications, want the news now and care less whether the copy is clean. And reporters, long a grammatically challenged bunch, are happy to deliver substance inside a flawed package.

Reader, writer and publisher alike seem to have decided that because you can’t judge a book by its cover, it’s OK to just slap a crappy cover on the book.

That’s a shame. Copy editors are the unsung heroes of America’s newsrooms. They are master craftsmen of the written word, and they have saved many a writer (including this one) from embarrassing moments.

Copy editing is one aspect of old media that needs to be a carryover in this new media era.