Great, great article

Muahahahha!!!

 

"Correction: November 5, 2006, Sunday An article last Sunday in Play magazine about Dallas Cowboys Coach Bill Parcells misstated the surname of a Dallas tight end. He is Jason Witten, not Whitten. The article also misstated the position that Chris Cooley of the Washington Redskins plays, and misidentified the former team of Washington's running back T. J. Duckett. Cooley is a tight end, not a wide receiver. Duckett played for Atlanta, not Denver. The article also referred incorrectly to a playoff game last season in which Dallas's kicker, Mike Vanderjagt, then with the Indianapolis Colts, missed a potential game-tying field goal against Pittsburgh. It was a divisional playoff game, not a conference championship game. "

This is what happens when you put non-sportswriters behind the keyboard.

 

Which is why seamheads considered "Moneyball" trash. And why a professional journalist wonders how much of the kid's story in "The Blind Side" was fact-checked.

 

Two or three times a year. But I generally don't write that many long pieces. I've had editors and copy editors introduce more errors and typos in the last year than I've made - which is a change, since the desk used to save me from myself more often than not.

 

Forget Michael Lewis...an editor can't catch that stuff?

 

I'm always disappointed on threads like this when I see the title, open it, and it's not my story.

 

Of course, the NYT copy editor shares the blame. But my greater point is, books almost never have fact-checking done, so if Lewis makes those elemental mistakes in a copy-edited piece, what're his books like?
As for my own mistakes in magazine work, my experience has been that no matter how assiduous I am, I make "mistakes" that are caught by fact-checkers -- because when the fact-checker goes to the interviewed subject, the subject tells the story another way with different details, and then the fact-checker wants to fix the "mistakes." And when you consider that newspapers do NO such second interviews on facts, every story comes out sounding, at best, not quite right to anybody involved in it. A tough business we're in. Unless you just don't care about getting it right.
Reminds me of what Ben Bradlee is supposed to have said to a media critic accusing the media of lying. "Yeah, we print lies," Bradlee said. "We print what people tell us."

 

As usual, jaredk is right. I've tried really hard to get a story through the magazine's fact-checking gnomes without their finding a mistake. So far, I'm 0-fer. And they've caught some howlers.

I owe each of them a massage with release.

 

Parcells can be a giant pain in the rear, but he's a great subject to write about. Covered him for two seasons in NY.

 

Alma beat me.

Of course, it's the NYT . . . and sports . . .

 

>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/sports/playmagazine/1029play_parcells.html?hp&ex=1162008000&en=00292a0d8a8a5745&ei=5094&partner=homepage <<<

anybody got a way to post the article since it's now in the paid archive section of the NYT Web site? Thanks.