Sloppy SI

[Cosmo]

I've only gotten through to the start of the Mannings story and I've already found two, while nit-picky, ridiculous errors in stories.

In an item on New Mexico State, it says the Aggies broke their losing streak against Division I-AA Southern Louisiana, a school that does indeed not exist. It's Southeastern Louisiana.

In the item on the Clemson kid taking in his kid brother, it says that Clemson beat Florida International in its opener last week. Later in the TV section, the magazine correctly reports that Clemson beat Florida Atlantic.

SI, you have how many copy editors? Cripes, get the **** right. This is part of the reason people think SI has sunk to lows never before imaginable. Those are errors that 40K circ newspapers would catch.

[/rant over]

 

[Shaggy]

Glad Mr. Perfect could chime in.

No matter how established, how compensated and how talented you are in this business, you will **** up.

 

[Cosmo]

We shouldn't tolerate those sorts of mistakes from the industry's leading magazine. It ain't about being perfect. I'm not.

EDIT: FWIW, Steve Rushin's column this week was tremendous.

 

[Moderator1]

Cosmo brings up a good point that I've made on here before.
SI used to be perfect. We'd play a game as kids - find a mistake in SI. You could not do it. Maybe one in two years, if that.

Now **** like he mentioned happens fairly regularly. Nit picky? HELL ****ING YEAH. Aren't we supposed to be that way?

 

[BTExpress]

Cosmo brings up a good point that I've made on here before.
SI used to be perfect. We'd play a game as kids - find a mistake in SI. You could not do it. Maybe one in two years, if that.
Now **** like he mentioned happens fairly regularly. Nit picky? HELL ****ING YEAH. Aren't we supposed to be that way?

I know you're sincere in this thought (though possibly exaggerating a little . . . one mistake in two years???).

But consider . . .

--- There is about 300% more content in SI today than there was when I was a kid. Everything from stories to sidebars to cutlines to brites to briefs and the whole shebang. There's just more. A lot more. More content + same deadlines = more mistakes. It's a mathematical certainty.

--- If you were a kid back in 1975 and wanted to "check" and see if Clemson really did beat FIU last week, what would you do? Go round up a Sunday paper from 5 days ago? Probably you would do nothing. You would just assume it was correct, because you couldn't possibly check every fact and things weren't as easy to check back then as they are now. Of course, things are also easier for copy editors to check, too. But "Clemson beat FIU" doesn't exactly raise a red flag with me. And the only reason I would recognize the mistake is because I live in FAU and FIU's area. If I didn't, I doubt I would have caught it as a copy editor.

And speaking of errors . . .

Newsweek did a business article on the Arizona Cardinals this week. In said article they referred to the "Indiana" Colts and hyphenated the word "play-offs".

Nobody's perfect.

 

[WSKY]

If these teams ever won anything, people would start getting their names right.

Bottom line, though, they should catch some of that silly ****.

 

[Hank_Scorpio]

Cosmo and Moddy are dead on here.

With the staff that SI has, a lot of these errors should be caught. Not only with the copy editors, but they also have a bunch of reporters. Check out the masthead. You have the senior writers, who get the bylined stories. But there are a good number of reporters and reporter-writers underneath that.

Those are the ones who should be fact checking and making sure these don't get in.

 

[Starman]

Cosmo brings up a good point that I've made on here before.
SI used to be perfect. We'd play a game as kids - find a mistake in SI. You could not do it. Maybe one in two years, if that.
Now **** like he mentioned happens fairly regularly. Nit picky? HELL ****ING YEAH. Aren't we supposed to be that way?

I know you're sincere in this thought (though possibly exaggerating a little . . . one mistake in two years???).

But consider . . .

--- There is about 300% more content in SI today than there was when I was a kid. Everything from stories to sidebars to cutlines to brites to briefs and the whole shebang. There's just more. A lot more. More content + same deadlines = more mistakes. It's a mathematical certainty.

Baloney. The page count of today's SI is probably half of what it was in the 1970s.

 

[DyePack]

Those are errors that 40K circ newspapers would catch.

[/rant over]

I agree with most of your post, but 40K newspapers are among the worst with fact-checking. More work than a smaller paper and more pressure to contain costs lead to slipshod work.

 

[TRS-80]

Didn't read Rushin yet this week. Did he mention he married Lobo, or is the next reference coming next week?

 

[HejiraHenry]

Cosmo brings up a good point that I've made on here before.
SI used to be perfect. We'd play a game as kids - find a mistake in SI. You could not do it. Maybe one in two years, if that.

Now **** like he mentioned happens fairly regularly. Nit picky? HELL ****ING YEAH. Aren't we supposed to be that way?

Yes.

 

[Ben_Hecht]

Overemphasis on speed (most important) . . . and too many kids, with insufficient background/seasoning . . .
do it, every time . . .

 

[clutchcargo]

One thing SI does better than anyone else is having writers insert themselves into their stories and effectivelly pat themselves on the back for being in position to do so.

Classic example was John Garrity at St. Andrews in 2005 just having to be in the right place at the right time when Nicklaus crossed the Swilcan bridge for his last time, writing it as though he were just a fan who happened to stumble onto this bit of history.

Tell me there's a reader in America who doesn't see through that kind of contrived crap.

 

[DyePack]

Used to get the golf section after they pulled the bait-and-switch with some other section. It went into the trash, both unread and immediately, if not sooner.

 

[playthrough]

I've sung the praises of Golf Plus here before...it's awesome. The standalone issues for the majors are a really nice bonus too.

But hell yes, the mistakes in the overall product are annoying. Moddy put it perfectly-- I can remember finding errors as a kid too and just being amazed. It would happen once every six months, tops.

 

[Rosie]

I agree with Moddy as well. We should be nitpicky. How else are you going to get better?

And I'm still wondering about "Super Bowl-champion Pittsburgh Steelers" which I saw in the SI NFL preview issue.

 

[BigRed]

Used to get the golf section after they pulled the bait-and-switch with some other section. It went into the trash, both unread and immediately, if not sooner.

You are an angry person. I'm not saying I'll shrivel up and die without Golf Plus, but God forbid I like something extra in my $40 a year SI. I also like Fantasy Extra. Line me up in your gun's crosshairs.
And by the way, for those who care, what happened to the cartoon that ran with Golf Plus? Last I saw, Stik was proposing to his caddie....

 

[Taylee]

My favorite SI screwup was a few years ago on a Brett Hull story. The next week, Brett's mother had a letter to the editor printed, saying while she appreciated the article, there were some mistakes. They were glaring ones like how many brothers he had.
Don't know if was was amazed more than such screwups find their way into the pages of SI or that SI had the balls to run Mom Hull's letter/correction.
Either way, fact-checking has gone downhill.

 

[tyler durden 71351]

I started getting the magazine again about two years ago and they had major errors in every issue...ran a photo of an assistant coach at Utah and said it was Urban Meyer (although the guys looked similar), put the Oklahoma State logo in the place of the Oklahoma logo. But, you know, you've got to let some of that dead weight on the copy desk go, so the suits and shareholders can make more money......

 

[ballscribe]

For those NY Times copy editors on board (you know who you are!) there were some pretty significant errors in a story today, ones I picked up because the player being written about was one of my people, a Canadian junior.

The kid sliced open his left leg falling three stories off a balcony while sleepwalking, in Mexico in mid-April. This is seriously what happened.

But the Times said it was "junior Davis Cup", which it wasn't. He was an alternate on the grownup Davis Cup team.

He didn't cut both his legs to the bone. He cut both legs, but it was the left one that was the issue. He severed the popliteal artery. It's a nasty looking scar, still.

He also didn't win the Canadian Open junior title; he lost in the finals.

He also didn't reach the semi-finals of the Australian Open juniors; he lost first round the last two years.

It also mentions he got a "special exemption" into the tournament, implying it was because of the time missed due to the injury. It wasn't; it was probably because was playing the final at the other tournament the weekend before the Open, which left him unable to travel to New York in time to play the junior qualifying which, ranked No. 69, he would have had to do.


There's more, but all that stuff is pretty easily verifiable. Pretty shoddy. Not familiar with the writer, John Eligon.