Media Orchard has a good inteview with Regret the Error‘s Craig Silverman and here’s an interesting bit on the NY Times’s boo-boo-prone TV critic Alessandra Stanley:
This is an instance where I sometimes wonder if I’m piling on. I don’t like the personal nature of the attacks on her, but she continues to make inexcusable errors. I call them inexcusable not because they are particularly egregious in the sense of their consequences. They are inexcusable because she is getting very simple things wrong on a consistent basis.
There’s a side element to this: the New York Times — the paper that created the modern correction format in the early 1970s — does not as a rule indicate the source of an error in a correction. Some other papers will note that it was a reporter’s error, or an editing error. It’s possible that some of her errors were inserted by an editor, but we don’t know because the paper doesn’t specify.
At this point the errors in her work have become a distraction and I would hope that this is something that her editors are working with her to change. You can’t just dismiss the criticism as blog chatter. Gawker and Reference Tone have proven that there’s an issue here.
I would prefer to see someone receive training and extra attention before getting canned for making errors, but there is a point where you have to draw the line. Really, is it so hard to re-check all the names and titles in a piece before putting it in the paper? I understand the pressure on newspaper reporters to file quickly, but it’s better to get it right than get it fast.
d
: And they continue.
