In her now-notorious message to the staff about minimizing embarrassing errors in copy, Cincinnati Enquirer editor Carolyn Washburn added parenthetically, "I even made myself spellcheck this email.
Even?
Running the spell-check is a supererogatory act for a journalist?
The spell-check function won't tell you when you have confused homonyms, or have spelled the wrong word right, but it will flag typos and inconsistent spellings of proper names. Within its scope, it is useful, and copy editors who know their business run the spell-check as their last action before sending a text along, to catch their own lapses.*
Of course, that copy editors use spell-check is a part of the problem. For journalists of a certain era, anything that smacks of production, anything those plebes on the copy desk do, was beneath their dignity. They recoiled in horror from using spell-check as an Edwardian gentleman would dread going into trade. (That era is not over, either. Every day, copy lands on my desk bearing evidence that no one upstream has used spell-check.
I once listened to two reporters at a neighboring desk discuss how OK ought to be spelled. They went back and forth for some minutes. I don't recall whether they settled on O.K. or okay, but I knew that it was best not to intrude as an officious copy editor, but to wait for the story to fall into my hands and fix it. Mind you, either of them could have looked up the preferred spelling in the Associated Press Stylebook or, for that matter, in The Sun's electronic stylebook.
One night I overheard a copy editor call a reporter, in this sequence: Look up number, dial, identify self, ask about the formal title of a local school, wait for reporter to check notes, thank reporter, hang up, return to copy. While this exchange was going on, I did a Google search and got the name in less than thirty seconds. Why a copy editor would call a reporter at night to query something that easily looked up eludes me, unless it was an effort to display diligence.
You have a spell-check function, a dictionary, a stylebook, and Google. Understand the limits of each, and, dammit, use them. You're supposed to be professional.
*The spell-check function provided with this software has proved so frustratingly unreliable that I now enter each post in Microsoft Word, then copy and paste onto this site.