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Q. I am working on creating a clip Web site and have run into some ethical questions. My newspaper, a 55,000-circulation daily that was much better when I started a year-and-a-half ago but has gone seriously downhill, has bad copy editors. Mostly, they insert lots and lots of hyphens where they don't belong. They also write headlines that are a.) the opposite of what the story says, or b.) grammatically incorrect. This occurs in just about every story, and sometimes I spend two weeks on a story only to have it butchered with hyphens and a false headline.

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They hyphenated "two-and-a-half years" in a lede when the number was not acting as a compound modifier; lowercased "Latino" in a headline, hyphenate "state-aid" on a regular basis; hyphenated percentages in one story (2-percent increase, etc.); and have inserted a slew of other grammatical and style mistakes into my copy.

Normally, I know, you tell people to keep trying to produce good clips and not use anything with a grammatical error. But I write mostly enterprise stories, and many of my clips are the product of two or more weeks of research, data analysis and interviews. And the copy desk almost always edits mistakes into them.

So here's my question: What is the rule about posting my stories on my own site sans the grammatical errors? What about the false headlines? In one case, only the subhead was blatantly false, so I figured I could just omit the subhead without a problem. As for the rest, I'm not sure what to do. I don't want to be unethical, but I also don't want to appear to be careless and hyphen-happy.

My second idea, if you say it is unethical to fix the mistakes back, is to ask our online editor to fix all the grammatical errors and false headlines in the Web archive. Would I be able to use the stories without the errors then? Or, I thought, I could use grammatically correct headlines and ledes on the index page and then post the story as it ran on the story page.

Thanks. Your blog has been invaluable to me throughout the years.

Ethically Torn

A. I'm sorry, but it's just not right to clean up clips post publication and to represent them as your published work. I also have a problem with asking the Web master to clean up your clips so they will look better for potential employers.

Joe Grimm

I really regret that errors are being inserted in your copy, but you just can't undo the editing and represent it as samples of your work.

You can't post your unedited work, either. There are way too many problems with that. At what stage do you stop editing your raw copy? What happens if sources or readers start comparing "before" and "after" versions of your article?

I'd get busy babysitting my important stories as they get edited, intervening at appropriate times to save them from being spoiled.

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Coming Monday: She aspires to be editor of her paper. To do that, she must first be local editor, but her skills in another area seem to prevent her from getting a shot.

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