Regret the Error » edmonton journal

Letter to the editor lifts from The Fountainhead

Craig Silverman — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:00:15 +0000

Two alert readers familiar with the works of American conservative philosopher Ayn Rand have pointed out that a letter in Monday’s Journal was largely plagiarized from a passage in Part 2 of The Fountainhead. The letter is signed “Dominique Francon”, a Fountainhead character to whom the lifted words are attributed in the book.

Here’s the offending letter.

Thanks, @mwickens!

Edmonton Journal deems headline “totally uncalled-for”

Craig Silverman — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:00:23 +0000

A headline on page A16 in Monday’s paper — “Carbon-capture plan reeks of dirty money” — was totally uncalled-for, and mis-characterized efforts by an Edmonton firm to finance and launch a carbon-capture-and-storage project. A subheadline on the same column unfairly implied that former premier Don Getty, in his capacity as one of the principals in the firm, was doing something wrong by seeking a government startup subsidy for the project.
Capital Reserve Canada Ltd. is perfectly eligible to apply for money under the government’s $2-billion carbon-capture initiative. Although the government is not asking that firms repay the subsidies once the associated project is up and running, the article made it clear that Getty insisted his firm would return the kickstart money.
Finally, the presentation of the article failed to make clear that it was an opinion piece by Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid.
The Journal apologizes for the errors. Link

It’s rare to see such strong language in a correction. Here’s a cached version of the column.

Thanks, X!

One writer’s mea culpa

Craig Silverman — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:00:47 +0000

From a blog post by Edmonton Journal columnist Todd Babiak:

I have written for the Journal since 2001. In that time, I have only caused three “corrections” â€” the dreaded sentence on the second page of the newspaper that describes an error on the part of the writer. Three times too many.
Steve Glassman, executive producer at CBC, is someone I see a lot. We talk. We joke. We know each other quite well. So why, in my Tuesday column, did I call him “Steve Blackman”?
I knew a Steve Blackman once, and apparently my brain wasn’t working properly in Banff â€” where I wrote the column. Maybe it was the thin air.
Nothing is more humiliating, more depressing, more soul-destroying.
Steve saw me on Tuesday, extended his hand, and said. “Hi, I’m Steve Glassman.”
At that moment, I knew precisely what I had done. I wanted to crawl under the table, in the Delegates’ Lounge at the Banff World Television Festival, and weep. Of course, this is an entirely selfish reaction. MY NAME was spelled correctly. He’s the one whose family and friends had to endure a misspelling. Perhaps Steve is now wandering around Banff, worried about his identity. Who am I? Who AM I?
I apologized to Steve, endlessly, and phoned my crackerjack editor, Keri Sweetman. She wrote the correction. Yet apologies are never enough. What IS enough? Three hundred percent more self-loathing, with extra not-sleeping, leading to a long bout of influenza, is a start…

Thanks, Chris and M!