Maspilling

In case you missed, thought you-all in the J-game, past or present, might be amused and/or surprised, as per moi, by this attached NooYark Sundae Tames piece by NYT Public Editor Clare Hoit on Miss Spelling of Names.

The frequnecy of that sin in that paper he reports is amazing, methought.

I'm still wondering whether the writer--or proof reader--might have misspelled any of the many names cited therein, provoking correction in the Times on Monday.

A bit near the end of the piece reminds this reader that when teaching eons ago at Carleton University J-school in Ottawa, a misspelled name in a student's story required an automatic failure mark. It could be awkward conveying such info to a faulting student whose name I couldn't spell. . . .

Another personal anecdote the Timespiece prompts: My first bylined piece at Reuters appeared prominently in the Washington Post--"By Carol Moolins."

(The tearsheet is somewhere in the basement.)

-cm 12-8-07

New York Times August 12, 2007

THE PUBLIC EDITOR

So Many Names, So Many Corrections

By Clark Hoyt

WHEN Michele Sugg, a clinical social worker from Branford, Conn., saw a friend’s name misspelled in The New York Times last month, she immediately asked for a correction.

Sugg’s friend was Stevie Ray Vaughan, the great blues guitarist. Years ago, Sugg worked at the Yale Psychiatric Institute with teenagers fighting drug and alcohol problems, and she said Vaughan was an inspiration to her patients. He had been a hard-core user who got sober, and he wrote encouraging notes to the kids.

But he has been dead for 17 years, so why get bothered now if The Times calls him Vaughn instead of Vaughan?

“One’s name is a part of one,” Sugg said. “It’s who you are. Even in death you want to be represented correctly.”

The fact is, The New York Times misspells names at a ferocious rate — famous names, obscure names, names of the dead in their obituaries, names of the living in their wedding announcements, household names from Hollywood, names of Cabinet officers, sports figures, the shoe bomber, the film critic for The Daily News in New York and, astonishingly and repeatedly, Sulzberger, the name of the family that owns The New York Times.

The Times has given Gen. Douglas MacArthur the middle initial A at least 25 times since 1987, though he had no middle name and didn’t use A, B, C or S, all of which have been ascribed to him.

So, you ask, what’s the big deal? Doesn’t The Times have more important things to worry about, like getting it right on Iraq and Iran and the presidential campaign?

Yes, a great newspaper has to get the big things right, but it also has to pay fanatical attention to thousands of details every day to prevent the kinds of mistakes that start readers wondering, “If they can’t spell his name right, what else is wrong with the story?”

Or, as Joe Lelyveld said in 2000, when he was executive editor of The Times, “When it comes to accuracy issues, tolerance and the larger view can be dangerous to our health.”

At a retreat of senior editors of The Times, Lelyveld called on them to “sweat the small stuff.” He bemoaned “the malignancy of misspelled names,” pointing out, among other things, that The Times had misspelled the first name of Madeleine Albright, who was then secretary of state, 49 times, despite running three corrections.

Unfortunately, the cancer appears to be getting worse. When Lelyveld spoke in
mid-September, there had been 198 corrections for misspelled names in The Times so far that year. Through yesterday, still in early August, there had been 269 this year. And the mistakes keep coming.

Monday’s corrections column on Page 2 contained three items that reflect helpless exasperation on the part of editors responsible for maintaining The Times’s high standards.

One noted that The Times had misspelled the name of Neiman Marcus, the department store, in at least 195 articles since 1930, most recently on July 21, in an obituary.

Another said that the name Willkie in the law firm of Willkie, Farr & Gallagher has been misspelled in at least 50 articles since 1958. It had happened again the previous Friday, in Business Day. The writer had dropped one of the two l’s in Willkie, who was Wendell L. Willkie, Franklin Roosevelt’s challenger in 1940.

But the killer was a correction for an article that ran the previous week, misspelling Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s last name for the 14th time since 2001, when he became White House counsel, including four earlier instances this year alone.

How could this one have happened, given that an editor in the Washington bureau, which has been responsible for 13 of the 14 mistakes, had recently sent colleagues a note of caution titled, “Do you know how to spell Gonzales?”

The latest misspelling appeared on Aug. 1. James Risen, a veteran national security affairs writer, said he was pushing deadline, typing fast and just got it wrong, typing Gonzalez, not Gonzales. “I should have gotten it right,” he said. “It was my fault, not the desk’s.”

The mistake was caught and corrected before the article was sent to New York. But the misspelling also appeared in two paragraphs that had been deleted for space reasons, so nobody fixed that part of the electronic copy.

Late in the evening, shortly before 11, editors decided that those two paragraphs needed to appear in the article because of competitive pressure: The Washington Post was putting the same information on Page 1. Susan Keller, the Washington bureau’s night editor, opened up the story, restored the paragraphs, then had to find other cuts to make room. The clock was ticking. An 11:30 deadline was approaching, other editors still had to read the article, and in her haste, Keller didn’t notice Gonzales’s name misspelled three times in the paragraphs she had put back.

In New York, time stamps indicate the story was opened at 11:10 p.m. and 11:12 p.m., and sent to type right on deadline at 11:30. Nobody noticed the errors. The spell-check in The Times’s electronic editing system does not flag either Gonzales or Gonzalez.

Keller was mortified by the error. She was the editor who had sent colleagues the note about Gonzales. “I guess it didn’t work,” she said.

I asked Greg Brock, the senior editor in charge of corrections, why he thinks so many names are misspelled in the paper, especially when The Times has so many layers of editing. In theory, every article is read by at least five people after a reporter finishes it, though stories written or changed for later editions often get far fewer checks.

Brock said that when he looks into mistakes he gets several common responses:

Reporters say they were operating from memory and didn’t bother to check. That’s what one writer said after misspelling the name of Julianna Margulies, the television actress.

Reporters assume that a name is spelled the “normal” way and don’t check. That’s what happened with the obituary of Neal Shine, the former publisher of The Detroit Free Press, whose first name was not Neil, as it appeared in the paper. Shine hired me in 1968, when he was the city editor of The Free Press, and he would get infuriated by errors like this.

Reporters checking names on the Internet are carelessly misled by other people’s misspellings.

Craig Whitney, the assistant managing editor in charge of standards, has another theory. “Their minds are on higher things,” he said. “They’re looking at the bigger story, and they think they can’t bother with details like that.” Besides, he added, they expect misspellings “will be caught on the copy desk.”

Is there anything that can be done to cure the problem? The Times has started keeping an electronic record of misspelled names, including the name of the staffer — spelled correctly — responsible for each error. I’d take another step to try to prevent more of the mistakes by creating a database of the most commonly misspelled names, so that editors are automatically flagged when they appear in copy. It’s Steven Spielberg, not Stephen.

Finally, my wife, a deputy managing editor at USA Today, had a journalism professor at Arizona State University who gave an automatic F to any class assignment that included a misspelled name.

The Times can’t do that, but maybe another kind of writing assignment is in order. How about requiring a personal letter of apology from the person responsible for an error to the person whose name is misspelled?

The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company