The reductions in the Times copydesk and the buyouts of experienced employees have been much in the news. It's hard to escape seeing evidence of it in the actual newspaper. Here are two recent examples.
A Tyler Kepner "On Baseball" column includes this sentence:
After the initial disclosure of the Boston sign stealing by Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times, Commissioner Rob Manfred all but said "boys will be boys" in a meeting with reporters at Fenway Park on Tuesday afternoon.
Michael Schmidt of the New York Times was stealing signs for Boston? Boys will be boys in the commissioner's meeting with reporters? This sentence manages twice to violate the Strunk and White rule to "keep related words together." The sentence could be easily fixed in a variety of ways. One possibility:
Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times broke the news that Boston had been stealing signs. After the Times story was published, Commissioner Rob Manfred met Tuesday afternoon with reporters at Fenway Park and all but said "boys will be boys."
A Ginia Bellafante "Big City" column begins:
Disasters are meant to inform each other, the mistakes of one recovery observed and presumably avoided in the next. Those tasked with remaking Houston in the wake of the current devastation, will have a thick playbook of error on which to reflect.
Never mind the worldview implicit in the idea that disasters are "meant" to do anything. What in the world is that comma doing after the word "devastation"?
Concern for this sort of thing may seem quaint in an age when people communicate largely by text messages in which grammar is ignored, or photographs in which punctuation is absent. But if the Times, with its vast staff of highly educated employees, can't be bothered to get this stuff right, why should taxpayers or volunteer donors keep spending millions of dollars to subsidize the use of the newspaper in school classrooms? For use in English classrooms as examples of how not to write?