Dallas Morning News Vilifies Jay-Z

One of the side-effects of the ever-changing media landscape is that various media companies are increasingly operating outside of their comfort zones. Instead of plodding away in the niches they've mastered over a great many years, some media companies think that because the Internet exists, they have a license to dabble willy-nilly in all kinds of newfangled media. The Dallas Morning News launched in print in 1885. Now, 125 years later, the newspaper is dabbling in video content--and screwing up as the discerning eye of Stan Kost recently revealed.

In an e-mail, Kost wrote the Proofreader:

I don't think that Jay-Z is a comic book villain, but The Dallas Morning News may think so. In a recent video about LeBron James and Jay-Z, the latter is described as a "Music mongul" - I'm sure that they meant "mogul". After all, Mongul is this comic book villain.

As you can see in the screen shot highlighted above, The Dallas Morning News F'd up the word mogul in the video's lower third. Stan--you, the Proofreader, any other individual with the smallest grain of cultural literacy and even (as evidenced by the caption in the above screen shot) The Dallas Morning News knows that Jay-Z is a music mogul, not a tyrannical comic book villain (though parallels between the two could certainly be drawn--fodder for a different blog) as this silly typo suggests.

The lesson that should be heeded here, by all newspapers trying to produce video content and by traditional T.V. news outlets, is to proofread those lower thirds and other graphics like it's your job, because, guess what? It is.

The Proofreader thanks Stan Kost for submitting the mistake.

No Eye Candy In This S.I. Screen Shot

Perhaps Sports Illustrated's annual antidote for the winter blues, or "The Swimsuit Issue," grabbed the lion's share of the S.I. editorial staff's attention and proofreading became an afterthought during the lead-up to the issue's publication. A reader has submitted yet another blunder made by the sports mag. This one occurred in a headline on its Web site and is by no means traditional eye candy. It's eye candy maybe only for misanthropic Proofreaders and others susceptible to the inexorable allure of Schadenfreude.

About a month ago, reader T.T. Douglas found the faulty headline pictured and highlighted above and e-mailed the Proofreader the following:

In the headline I believe they are trying to say "outrage" as in "fans are outraged," but instead they typed "outrange." Nice!

Nice, yes. Also nice: T.T. went on to say a couple of laudatory things about the Proofreader--always a great idea.

And yes. T.T., S.I. most definitely intended to to use the word "outrage" (rather than the gibberish "outrange") as evidenced by the correction it made shortly after you noticed the bungled headline. Hopefully this mistake and another recent blunder made by S.I. aren't examples of a new sensibility the magazine is toying with. Stick to the mainstream eye candy you've gotten to know so well over the last 46 years, S.I.: under-clothed skinny babes.

The Proofreader thanks T.T. Douglas for submitting the mistake.

Times Corrects Minor Typo In Front Page Obama Caption

The New York Times published a caption this afternoon that read a tad awkwardly. As you can see in the side-by-side screen shots below, Times editors published a headline that read, "The president stopped into a White House briefing room..." in a pointer positioned in the main section of its Web site's front page and leading to this story on The Caucus blog. The use of "stopped" in the caption seemed odd to be sure, but not necessarily wrong. However, confirmation that it was a mistake became apparent fourteen minutes later when Gray Lady editors changed "stopped" to "stepped" in the copy.

At the same time, as you probably noticed, Times editors changed the photo of President Obama used on the front page. It's not clear why: Both pictures of the POTUS are actually beautifully shot. Moreover, if you're a regular reader of the blog, you'll realize this is the second time this year the Times has had copy issues in this space of its front Web page.

Sloppy Copy on TriMet Sign

The ways in which government incompetence manifests are many and that incompetence, too often, reveals itself to the public in the form of sloppy copy on municipal government-issued signage. The latest found example is courtesy of reader Sean Patrick, who snapped the below photo as the TriMet MAX train he was riding pulled into the Gateway Transit Center in Portland, Oregon.

In his e-mail message, Patrick wrote that the mistake was on a sign "on the door to where the operator sits to drive the train" and "it caught my eye." It caught his eye because the S tacked onto the last word of the sign's second line resulted in the usage of the wrong tense of the verb "to vandalize." The copy should just read vandalize, sans the S on the end. In the second paragraph, the sign writers, editors and makers managed to use "vandalizes" properly, but that by no means negates the mistake above it.

TriMet's offering a cool $1,000 reward to people who report the assault of TriMet workers or vandalism of TriMet property to the transportation agency. Too bad for the Proofreader and Sean Patrick that there's not a similar cash reward up for grabs to those who report the assault and vandalism of the English language on government-issued signage.

The Proofreader thanks Sean Patrick for submitting the mistake.

Headline Blunder First of Two Mistakes In Telegraph Story

In this story on the Web site of The Daily Telegraph, Spanish politician Gaspar Llamazares decried the "low level" of intelligence the FBI demonstrated by using his hair and facial features in a digital simulation of what Osama bin Laden might look like sans his usual long beard and turban get-up. (They basically just made Llamazares look older, called him bin Laden and then took the rest of the afternoon off). In a similar vein, the Proofreader is decrying the low level of proofreading skills demonstrated at the Telegraph for allowing spelling mistakes in the headline and body of said article--mistakes reported to the Proofreader by Stan Kost.

As you can see highlighted in the screen shot above, the word politician is short one i, and misspelled "politican." Highlighted in the below screen shot of the article's sixth graph, Kost noticed the word technician was lacking an i, and misspelled "technican."

"I can't attribute it to simply a British spelling variation (as I can with "programme" in the same paragraph)," wrote Kost in his e-mail message, while also marveling at how technician was spelled correctly in the previous sentence and bungled so soon after. The Proofreader's guess: Maybe the i key on the writer's keyboard was sticking or something, because both mistakes are similar in nature. That's an explanation, but not an excuse, because copy editors or proofreaders should've caught these blunders.

The Telegraph offers readers a very thorough online Style Book, however, interestingly, the book mentions nothing on the merit of careful proofreading. Perhaps Telegraph Style Book editors should write that entry--pronto!

The Proofreader thanks Stan Kost for submitting the mistakes.

Siriusly Bad Spelling

Just because the Proofreader is behind the wheel of his car doing 85 m.p.h. on the highway doesn't mean he's not on the lookout for printed mistakes. Know that he risked life, limb and a traffic ticket to bring you this holiday-themed mistake.

It's a little blurry since the picture was taken with a cell phone held by one hand, but, as you can see highlighted above, it's a mistake made by Sirius XM Radio. Sirius XM likes to call regular radio "terrestrial," so, perhaps, this is an extra-terrestrial spelling blunder.

Notice that Christmas was erroneously spelled "Chirstmas" by the data entry guy at Sirius XM who enters song titles into its database. If Christmas was too long a word or presented too much of a potential for typos, maybe he should've gone with the famous and shorter Xmas variant.

The song playing was The Beach Boys' version of "I'll Be Home For Christmas" and please be assured that the arrangement of this Christmas classic was every bit as bad (if not worse) than you'd expect The Beach Boys to have made it. Not only was it a mistake to have typed the title the way it was typed, but it was a mistake for someone to have ever made a recording of The Beach Boys' version and another mistake for someone to have played it.

Earlier this year, Sirius XM was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, leaving the company, evidently, unable to afford competent proofreaders.

The Proofreader wishes everyone a Happy New Year! He'll see you in 2010 with more printed mistakes that never should've been made.

Lots of Gibberish In Story About Fat-Drinking Commercial

Which is more disgusting: The newly-released commercial by the New York City Health Department, or the sloppy copy in a news story about the commercial? In the commercial, a man is shown guzzling a glass of what is supposed to be fat, the health department's not-so-subtle way of denouncing gluttonous soda drinking. In the article published on the Web site of WCBS local news in New York, there's an instance of what appears to be a typo that resulted in gibberish in the seventh graph and then, in the second-to-last graph, there's just plain gibberish.

As you can see highlighted in the screen shot above, WCBS combined the words "the" and "obesity" to create "thobesity." Sorry, WCBS. That's not a recognized portmanteau. Highlighted in the below screen shot, WCBS uses "widash" in the middle of a sentence. Wait, what? Having never seen widash used earnestly as a word before, the Proofreader looked it up and couldn't find an entry for it in several credible online dictionaries.

To make sure WCBS wasn't getting all highbrow in a story with a lowbrow hook, the Proofreader consulted Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the OED and author of The F-Word. If widash is some brand-new or über-obscure word, Sheidlower would know and he says it isn't. In an e-mail message, he writes that widash "seems pretty clearly to be a typo or some artifact of the publication process, rather than any new word or even a thinko of some kind."

As for which is more disgusting, perhaps it's a toss-up. Click here to see the commercial of the guy drinking a glass of fat.

The Proofreader thanks Jesse Sheidlower.

More Typos In Coverage of Tiger Woods Scandal

The Proofreader is trying to keep up with the women in the Tiger Woods scandal, but simply cannot. At the latest count, twelve women have allegedly had affairs with the golfing great. That's three more women since the last post. To counter the additional three women, the Proofreader has only found two additional mistakes, and they're minor typos, to bring the total to five errors. It's turned into a runaway by Woods's women.

As you can see highlighted in the above screen shot from this tawdry CBS News blog, there is an erroneous pluralization of the word "email." The mistake could've been remedied in one of two ways: By removing the S to make "emails" singular; or by deleting addresses--but doing that would compromise some of the sentence's clarity.

And, highlighted in the below screen shot from The Baltimore Sun's Web site is the wrong form of the indefinite article "a"; it's written as "an" instead.

Find any other printed mistakes in the Tiger Woods coverage? E-mail the Proofreader.

Minor Typos In Slate Article about Tiger Woods/Salahi Scandals

The Tiger Woods and Salahi Whitehouse party-crashing scandals are two stories that, like a certain credit card company slogan, defiantly refuse to go away. Thus, the more that's written about them, the greater the likelihood of a copy mistake. Behold two minor typos in a story on Slate (that married the two scandals in an effort to explain their persistence in the social consciousness) highlighted for your convenience in the screen shots below:

 In the second paragraph, the word "woman" should've been written in its plural form, "women." No doubt a small typo, but notable because Slate is typically the model of impeccable copy editing.

Further down, in the article's epilogue, there is a space missing in "one-thirdof." The space, obviously, should've been placed between third and of.

These can't have been the only printed mistakes that shouldn't have been made in the coverage of these two stories, but they are the only two the Proofreader has found. Notice one? E-mail a screen shot of it to the Proofreader.

Record Low Temp Occured 16,000 Years Into the Future?

18,915? Huh? Settle down, now, Eyewitness News. Stop trying to play mind games. Everybody knows the record low of 55 degrees in New York City on August 18 couldn't possibly have happened some 16,000 years in the future. However, it is possible that proofreading will still be in vogue in 18,915. So look at the bright side: Everyone at WABC has over 16,000 years to master those all-important proofreading skills. Should be plenty of time to nail it down.

The Proofreader caught this one a few months ago--stay tuned for more mistakes that Proofreader has been too busy to post over the last few months as he cleans off his desktop.

Woes Continue For Job Seekers, Job Posters

The unemployment has rate vaulted over ten percent in the U.S. Unemployment benefits continue getting extended by state governments and the federal government. As if that news isn't depressing enough, many employers, either frightened by the continuously growing mob of job seekers or defiantly mocking that mob, continue making silly, juvenile blunders in their online job postings.

Today's example of proofreading buffoonery comes to you courtesy of the H.R. people over at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. As you can see highlighted in the above screen shot, according to a job posting strewn about the Internet, MetLife is looking to hire a Director of "Comminications."

No doubt--the "I" and "U" keys sit right next to each other on the QWERTY keyboard, making for an easy typo opportunity. But this typo could've been averted with careful proofreading. You'd think that, when hiring for a communications position, MetLife would want to communicate to applicants in a way that wouldn't distract/annoy/amuse/infuriate those applicants.

Presumably, careful proofreading and straightening out idiotic communications problems will fall under the purview of the lucky sap to land this gig.

Errors Aplenty In Times Baseball Column

Summer. The weather heats up (or warms up, this year), the days are longer, the overall pace of life slows down a little and people take all kinds of measures to maximize their enjoyment of the season. Often, those measures involve a vacation of one type or another. For many, the vacations are all mental. Good, old-fashioned escapism. Perhaps this explains the recent lapses over at The New York Times, because it seems like whatever Times employees have been editing and proofreading the Op-Extra "Heading Home" column have been on a protracted mental vacation. Come on, Times H.R. department--give these people a real vacation so they can refresh, recharge and return to form! The mistakes lately have been silly and elementary.

The first one, an instance of bad HTML, happened in a column published nearly a month ago titled "Fehr's Game." Interestingly, this isn't the first time "Heading Home" has been plagued by bad HTML. As you can see above, in the second-to-last paragraph of the column's first page, the word "all" appeared printed with HTML tags intended to make the word appear italicized. This one was corrected rather quickly, but was unable to elude the Proofreader.


Next, as you can see above, yesterday's installment of the column contained a spelling error that was probably caused by a typo. The writer was looking for the word "choose," but ended up typing the past tense "chose," which turned out to also be the wrong tense.

These mistakes are a shame, because they mar what is an otherwise great column that gives readers a unique perspective of a real MLB player's view of baseball and the world. There's no excuse for these silly blunders that only distract from the fine content. Hopefully, a vacation is in order for the editors and proofreaders in question. Everyone needs vacations, even proofreaders. Check that. Especially proofreaders!

Bad Spelling In TVNewser Headline

It's a rather boring blog that covers the rather boring topic of television news. But just because it's a blog and it's steeped in boredom doesn't mean TVNewser is exempt from employing adequate proofreading practices. Still, an apparent lapse in proofreading proficiency occured last Tuesday, as you can see in the highlighted screen shot below.

In the headline of this post, about families of soldiers who were upset that news of their loved ones' deaths was overshadowed by the tsunami of Michael Jackson death coverage in the media, TVNewser editors allowed soldiers to be misspelled "soliders." Headline blunders never cease to confound the Proofreader. The text is in big, bold letters. It's not that hard to give it a quick once-over before clicking the "Publish Post" button, now is it?

The error has since been corrected, but still...Soliders? C'mon, it's a headline. Proofread, damnit.

Miscues In Philly

Lately the miscues in Philadelphia haven't been limited to those being made on the field by the team that plays its home games at Citizens Bank Park. No, they're happening in the media coverage of that team too. Behold the below screen shot taken from the Philly.com sports page on Monday, June 15th. On the left is the beautiful sight of Jimmy Rollins swatting a homer into the right field seats. On the right is a typo of first-grade ineptitude.


It's a tease for this article that appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News just after the Phillies salvaged the last of a three-game series with the Boston Red Sox by defeating the "Sawx" 11-6. As you can see highlighted above, there's an extraneous T in the word "the." The capital T belongs there, but the lower-case T immediately following it is clearly unnecessary and should've been caught by a proofreader before being published. Hopefully the Phillies and the Philly sports media can get things turned around--pronto!

Job Posting For Copy Editor Needed Copy Editing

Job postings for proofreaders or copy editors written with sloppy copy are some of the most amusing and, simultaneously, scary examples that get highlighted on the blog. What makes them so great is that these employers know they need help and, even when asking for it, can't manage to avoid letting third-grade mistakes get published online. It's the kind of unparalleled mix of self-awareness and incompetence that can only be displayed by Human Resources people, who typically can't read beyond a third-grade level.

The above screen shot, taken a couple of months ago and highlighted for your viewing convenience, contains three mistakes that never should've been made. "Editting," which reared its ugly head twice, should, as any elementary school student knows, be editing, with one T, not two. And name of the magazine is Woman's World, not "Women's World," as this posting would have you believe. It's not clear which employer sought this copy editor, but whichever publication was looking to hire outsourced the task to Adecco Creative, a glorified temp agency.

What's so scary about this is that the clowns responsible for this mess are the very people who advised the employer on which applicants are the strongest candidates for the position. The Proofreader's not sure how that's logically possible.

Wait a second. Aren't copy mistakes in job postings for proofreaders and copy editors a sly way for employers to weed out weak candidates? Only the applicants who mention the errors in their cover letter get contacted because it's assumed those that didn't mention the mistakes didn't notice them, right? Perhaps in some postings. That's an old trick, but not the case with this job posting. The Proofreader spoke to the headhunter at Adecco looking to fill this position and that individual said these mistakes were genuine and not intentional. Yep, funny and scary at the same time, especially in this economy. Best of luck to ya, job seekers!

Post Makes Error In Phils/Yanks Preview

Tonight an epic, three-game series opens at Yankee Stadium: The WFC Philadelphia Phillies are taking on the Bronx Bombers. There's much anticipation about the series and in today's edition of the New York Post, on page 93, exists a small error in the preview of the "weekend showdown," which highlights the pitching match-ups for the series.


As you can see highlighted in the above picture, Post editors screwed up A.J. Burnett's E.R.A. Instead of placing a decimal point between the five and the two, they put a colon, making it look like the time 5:02. No doubt, the E.R.A. is atrocious and not what the Yanks had in mind when they signed Burnett to a contract that pays him $16.5 this year, but that doesn't mean it should be misrepresented in the Post because of an avoidable typo. It should read 5.02.

Hopefully the error is an omen for New York's inferiority to Philadelphia on the baseball field--'cause New York is superior to Philly in almost every other way. This should be a great series and the Proofreader is looking for it to turn into a home run derby for the Phils and all of their power-hitting left-handed batters. Let's go Phils!

Legalese Bungle...Made By Lawyers

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," wrote Shakespeare in Henry VI. That quote has become famous due to a general social contempt toward lawyers, but, until now, the Proofreader has never had a reason to dislike attorneys. In fact, he even married one and today's mistake is submitted by the Mrs. Proofreader. So, to paraphrase the Bard, let's mock all the lawyers who wrote the sloppy legalese on the California Department of Insurance Web site. As you can see in the highlighted screen shot below, the attorneys who wrote this riveting broker fee regulations summary erred with their use of "therefor" in the last line of the second graph.

At a glance, it looks like these lawyers simply made a pedestrian typo, forgetting to type the "e" on the end of "therefore." And that may have been what happened, but..."Therefor," albeit seldom used, is a legitimate word, common legalese. The problem is that therefor and therefore have different meanings and these attorneys, who most definitely should be on high alert for a mistake like this, should've gone with the one with the e on the end that means “consequently, hence, for that reason.” Come on, they're lawyers.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time the Proofreader's had to break out the highlighter for this Web site. In his maiden post, the Proofreader pointed out an instance of the word "pursuant," also very common in lawyer parlance, misspelled. These lawyers have got to pull it together.

The Proofreader thanks Mrs. Proofreader for submitting the mistake.

Caption Of A Typo

WTF is going on over at Newsday.com? Lately, editors there have been screwing up headlines likes it's their job and now they let some sloppy copy get printed in a photo caption. As you can see highlighted in the screen shot to the left, the caption underneath the picture of the neatly-dressed music teacher claims that this fine, upstanding gentleman "could loss his job next year." Actually, he could lose his job next year and, if he does, that will then be considered a "loss." This article was published on the Newsday Web site on March 26th and, as of this posting, has still not been corrected.

If the Proofreader can opine for a moment here...the euphemistic language (loss, lost, losing, etc.) used in association with people getting fired from their jobs is driving the the Proofreader up a wall because it sounds like a total misnomer. It's not like people wake up bewildered one day and say, "Oh crap...where's my job? Anyone know where my office is? I forget where I work," like they're saying they can't remember where they parked their car. All these people got fired, or laid off through no immediate fault of their own. That means they had their jobs taken from them--they didn't lose them. This practice of sugarcoating is the equivalent of somebody who gets car-jacked casually noting, "Yeah, I lost my car today." Perhaps the spate of recent copy errors over at Newsday is a result of some proofreaders having had their jobs taken from them.

TV Guide and Mediacom Tag-Team Prison Break Mistake

Well, yet another copy mistake has been caught by the sharp-eyed Stan Kost, which has led the Proofreader to hiring him as the blog's Midwest correspondent. Welcome, Stan. In an e-mail, Stan wrote, "The Prison Break repeat episode which airs tonight is indeed titled 'The Sunshine State,' not 'The Sunshire State,' as either TV Guide or Mediacom has indicated." As you can see in the highlighted picture below, Stan noticed a typo in the episode's synopsis on his digital cable guide. So, who's to blame for this screw up?


Both Mediacom and TV Guide, although the mistake originated with TV Guide. According to a spokesperson at Mediacom, who seemed a tad too quick to blame TV Guide for the blunder, the digital cable provider purchases its digital cable guide content from TV Guide...but never proofreads that content before making it available to customers. Therefore, Mediacom, because of its utter and wanton laziness, gets to share some of the blame with poor TV Guide.

You have to feel a little bad for TV Guide. The Internet, TiVo and digital cable have all conspired to render our old favorite, "The Guide," virtually obsolete. Once upon a time, TV Guide was the venerated authority on T.V. listings, but had become so embarrassingly irrelevant in the T.V. listings business, that it was forced to change from a "digest" to a "glossy" format a few years back and now focuses more on gossipy, celeb news. Evidently, its attempt to maintain some of the T.V. listings market share in the digital era hasn't been all smooth sailing.

As you can see in the highlighted screen shot above, the blunder is not only limited to TV Guide-powered digital cable guides. It also exists on the TV Guide Web site, shamefully, just above a correct spelling of the word sunshine. It's a somewhat common mistake among bloggers and what not, but definitely shouldn't be made by pros. Thanks again, Stan, and welcome to the fold.

New York Mets Make Error In Media Guide

Over the last couple of years the New York Mets have been best known for their September collapses, but they've also had at least one breakdown in the copy editing department. On page 249 of the team's 2008 media guide--ace hurler Johan Santana's page--the Mets media relations office let a typo make it to print. Usually the Mets make their most memorable errors on the field, late in games against the Phillies (Reyes booting a ball or making a mental error, Aaron Heilman throwing the ball away, the bullpen generally choking, are a few that immediately come to the Proofreader's mind), but this error is immortalized in print for everyone to mock for as long as the Internet exists.


As you can see in the highlighted picture above, in the second line of the last bullet point in Santana's biographical info, the Mets made a spelling error with "triubute." That's not a word. Tribute is what they were looking for, but, much like the playoffs the last few years, the Mets were woefully unable to find it. You'd think the Mets wouldn't have allowed a mistake like this to get printed on the page of the team's big off-season fee agent signing--if you're going to slack on proofreading, how about Marlon Anderson's page? But Santana, amazingly, didn't let the slight bother him and was really the only pitcher on the Mets who showed up and pitched well last year.

The Proofreader's MLB prognosis for 2009: much of the same. Santana will be dominant again this year and the Mets may even build what appears to be a comfortable lead in the N.L. East. But, in the end, the Mets will submit to the far superior Philadelphia Phillies. Just watch! Let's go Phils!