That’s Times, spelled T-I-M-E-S

September 17th, 2006 → 10:39 am @ Seth Mnookin // No Comments

It’s been twenty years since Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter founded the late, great Spy magazine, and since then, it’s not as if Andersen’s been a shrinking violet. He was the editor in chief of New York. He co-founded Inside.com. He’s been a columnist for Time and The New Yorker.

And he’s currently a columnist for New York, hosts “Studio 360” for Public Radio International, and has a novel coming out inthe spring.

You’d think that, with this resume, there’d be someone at the Times — if not the writer, then a story editor, and if not a story editor, a copy editor — who knows that Andersen doesn’t spell his name with an ‘o,’ as in ‘Anderson.’ And yet in a story in today’s Style section about the just-launched Good magazine,” there’s this quote:

“I was really surprised at how much I wanted to read it, and how good it looked on a first glance of a first issue,” said Kurt Anderson, a former editor and founder of magazines, including Spy and Inside.Com. “First issues aren’t necessarily great, but I was impressed by how it looked, the writers they got to write. It’s an interesting idea. Lord knows if they can make a go of it commercially.”

A quick online search shows the Times has made this mistake at least eight times since Andersen founded Spy. Still, he shouldn’t feel too badly: as recently April, the Times was still getting the name of the paper’s founding family, the Ochs-Sulzbergers, wrong. And they’ve only owned the paper for 110 years.

Post Categories: Kurt Andersen & New York Times