Journalists have principals, dammit
The eagle-eyed and meticulously nitpicking blog Regret the Error may hail from the isolated wilds of Montreal but through the wonders of web technology it scans the world of print journalism, ready to catch errors egregious and unegregious, like for example if someone used the word unegregious. Naturally, Regret the Error loves our old pal Seth Mnookin, who is so meticulous himself that he included a corrections section in the paperback version of “Hard News” (which as we said before was so damn smart because looky here, it’s still coming up). To wit: Regret the Error inaugurates its interview series with Mnookin, explaining that he is uniquely appropriate because of this steadfast commitment to accuracy and transparency. But it may also have something to do with the frilly shirt.
Here’s where we couldn’t help but goggle a little: RTE kicks off with this intro: “Regret talked to him about the book’s corrections, fact checking, and the time a spellchecker butchered his front page story.” Now we would have hyphenated “front” and “page” to modify “story” but that’s neither here nor there; we’ve plainly admitted when we’ve been stymied by grammatical challenges. However, in a piece specifically about spell-checking and accuracy we’d have thunk it would have behooved RTE to turn its eagle eye on itself when transcribing all the Mnookspeak so as not to publish this clunker:
That was the relationship between then metro editor Jon Landman and then national editor Jim Roberts. The reason it was so preventable was because it was a situation in which I should have checked with the principles.
To paraphrase RTE, the error mentioned above was of course easily preventable by proofreading, but we love you anyway RTE. You’re our peep. That doesn’t sound right at all but we’re brazen enough to just leave it there in all its unegregiosity.
By the way, we are officially rebelling against the ubiquitous frilly shirt, hence the far-more-manly-if-we-do-say-so-ourselves headshot above. Here, decide for yourself after the jump.
UPDATE: Heard from Craig Silverman of Regret the Error — he fixed it on up and very nicely let the whole egregiosity thing slide. Now all we need to deal with is the frilly shirt.
