Back in December, Wayne Ezell, the reader advocate of the Times-Union, offered a recounting of a story and correction that went awry:
When last Sunday’s Business section featured a story and photo about nine luxury condos and nine boat slips being sold at auction in Queens Harbor, it came as quite a surprise to some readers.
“It was shocking,” said Herb Schulz, a Realtor who sells high-end property in what he describes as “the best development like this on the East Coast.”
There is no such place as Queens Harbor around here. Nor does Jacksonville have a Queens Harbor area, as was suggested in the story.
But there is an upscale development along the Intracoastal Waterway between Atlantic Boulevard and Wonderwood Drive where prices range between $500,000 to $5 million, according to Schulz. Its name is Queen’s Harbour Yacht & Country Club (note the punctuation and spelling).
They don’t have condos there. No boat slips are for sale.
There may have been some bank foreclosures among the more than 900 owners in Queen’s Harbour, but never anything close to an auctioneer under a tent hawking properties.
That would be the kind of thing that happened a mile or so away at a place called Watersedge at Harbortown, where the developer unloaded some remaining condos and boat slips in an auction last month.
Our reporter and photographer were there. Unfortunately, the reporter thought there was an area of the city known as Queens Harbor that included Watersedge.
A correction attempted to set things straight and did so regarding the location of the auction. But it did not go far enough, according to John E. O’Neil Jr., a former chairman of the Queen’s Harbour property owners’ association.
“Folks were upset by being labeled as having condos in here,” he said. Also, the development’s boat slips are not on the Intracoastal Waterway. They are on a lagoon that connects to the waterway through a lock.
Last week’s errors were not the first instance of the newspaper getting it wrong when writing about Queen’s Harbour. Far from it.
During the last three years the paper has made at least 20 incorrect references to “Queens Harbor” or “the Queens Harbor area.” It has happened in Metro, Sports, Business, Lifestyle, in Community sections and in an editorial.
In fairness, some complicating factors may lead to errors. The Queen’s Harbour name is often spelled incorrectly. Examples include Mapquest, Google maps and the Supervisor of Elections Web site.
Furthermore, Queens Harbor Boulevard, which runs through the development is spelled differently and contains no apostrophe. That is because the U.S. Post Office would not allow the Harbour spelling, according to O’Neil.
As for “the Queens Harbor area,” one can imagine the number of marketers who have tried to identify with the prestigious community that is home to several Jaguars players, heads of local companies and prominent retirees.
But “Queen’s Harbour Yacht & Country Club” and “Queen’s Harbour” are trademarks, according to Greg Kaufman, the development’s general manager.
Those names “should never be used descriptively for a geographic area outside the named residential community or in any other manner which blurs, dilutes or tarnishes the trademarks,” he wrote in a request for a correction.
Apparently unaware, the newspaper once wrote about a new store “at the Queens Harbor Stein Mart location.” In fact, the store is in a nearby shopping center on Atlantic Boulevard known as Harbour Village.
Stein Mart lists “Queen’s Harbour” as one of its seven store locations in its advertising.
The errors in Sunday’s story combined with earlier incorrect references to the development reflect an unacceptable level of carelessness. Now that Queen’s Harbour officials have pointed out the problem, readers should expect improved accuracy.
