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Fun NYT correction
The New York Times deserves credit for being so forthright with its corrections. Occasionally they're funny, like this one from today's Corrections (emphasis mine):
An obituary on July 21 of Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, who marketed memorabilia and toys based on A. A. Milne's children's books about Winnie the Pooh, misspelled the name of the department store that agreed to let her set up Pooh Corners for children. It is Neiman Marcus, not Nieman Marcus. (The Times has misspelled the company's name in at least 195 articles since 1930.)
Can't say they're not persistent.
Maybe they should just add that to their auto-correct list?
This brings up an interesting and related issue: in the print world, a correction would be printed in a subsequent publication. However, now we can actually go back and correct the archived version of the story or article.
But should we? Should the record of a given news article on a given day remain untouched, to be seen as it was seen on its publication date? Or should it be revised transparently, so no one will know the facts were updated to reflect new information. Or should we simply post amendments to articles in a sidebar next to the article.
This is an issue that many journalists are debating these days, and one that was impossible to imagine just a few years ago. After all, how could we go back and change everyone's newspaper once it was delivered?
And how can we retract spelling mistakes (or worse, sometime far worse) in e-mail messages that we have sent out to the wide world? There are products that enable this to be done, to some extent: for example, the imminent IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8 server allows mail messages to be retracted, provided they are within the organization's domain (but not if they've left it). Is it a good idea to retract e-mail messages? Even if it were 100% possible no matter where they were sent, what if some recipients have opened the message and saved a copy? And what about copies stored along the way on intermediate servers, or copies captured by snoopers (of various types)?
In a similar vein, see Slate magazine
http://www.slate.com/id/2172155/
"Katharine with an "a," please. Many journalists have misspelled the first name of the late Katharine Graham. I once made the error in an article, and a Nexis search shows that her own newspaper, Washington Post, has spelled her first name "Katherine" at least a couple dozen times in the past 30 years. In 1986, the Post goofed so badly that it published an "Outlook" section piece under the byline "Katherine Graham."
"Columnist Robert D. Novak, who should really know better, joins the Katharine misspellers in his new memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington. He renders her name "Katherine" at least seven times in the book, including the index, and I don't think he gets it right once. I trust that Novak, who has contributed a syndicated column to the Post since 1963 and knew Graham personally and professionally, will get her name right in the Prince's paperback edition.
******
"In her memoir, Personal History, Katharine Graham writes that her mother named her after artist Katharine Rhoades."