Egregious errors

All it took was a quick internet search to find some appalling, unbelievable and hilarious mistakes printed in newspapers, magazines and websites this past year. Here are some of my favorites.

Poynter listed some of the worst errors of 2012

-Vogue Magazine apologized for calling Deputy Asst. Secretary of State Dan Baer an interior designer.

- The Wall Street Journal needed to correct a quote from Michael Cerveris about his performance in the musical “The Who’s Tommy.” Cerveris said, “I couldn’t sing it all when I got the job.” The article incorrectly quoted him as saying, “I couldn’t sing at all when I got the job.”

-The Daily Beast accidentally spoke of famed Washington Post editor "Bill Bradlee's" new book. (Ben Bradlee, perhaps?)

And some more listed by The Atlantic Wire

-A Romney campaign ad misspells America as "Amercia"

-An AP article, speaking of the scandal regarding General Petraeus, spoke of "Florida socialist Jill Kelley"

- The Los Angeles Times adds an extra 't' to create this winner of a sentence: "Butt cracks eventually appeared in Lamb's persona."


While these incorrect facts and typos make us laugh, as a journalist this is fairly demoralizing. All it takes is one error and your reputation is shot for good. I didn't notice many trends in errors overall, but saw a few themes within specific organizations. For example, corrections for the New York Times were usually very detailed and specific deviations, as opposed to typos. The smaller print news papers had more grammatical errors, such as "corrections" being spelled wrong above the corrections column. This exercise reiterated for me the fact that very small mistakes make huge issues, many of which could have been avoided with a good copy edit. In all instances, the news organization did come forward and take responsibility of the errors. Some tweeted new links and some reprinted in following editions, but they all came forward.