There have also over the past 20+ years been big changes in the way publications are created. When I first started freelancing, one of my editors sent me an email specifically to say how happy he was with what I’d filed. He remarked that he’d “only had to change one semi-colon”. I thanked him and noted that I proofed the work as best I could before it was sent. He replied, saying most writers don’t—but they’d probably start having to.
That was prescient, because gradually magazine staff got chipped away. Editors became fewer in number. Production staff were increasingly spread across multiple publications. Even high-end mags suffered similar problems, and newspapers increasingly do as well. The point is that whereas once you as a writer could have got away with sending the ideas as something half-formed for some poor sod to smash into shape in-house, that’s no longer acceptable, with a few exceptions. (There are some old-guard writers for national newspapers still getting away with that, for example.)
I’ve no idea if that’s the case with GFD, of course. But if there were any old-school script droids being a bit slapdash in their writing, in a manner that required heavy editorial input, I suspect that would not have cut it years ago, let alone in the modern era where Matt Smith has a frankly bonkers level of workload.
