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A report about the former media mogul Conrad Black said his first newspaper title was the Sherbrooke Record, “a small Canadian weekly”. The Record is published five days a week and has never been a weekly. Neither was it Black’s first newspaper. He had already acquired the Eastern Townships Advertiser, a community newspaper in Quebec (US court frees Conrad Black on bail, 20 July, page 20).
Cardinal Richelieu was Louis XIII’s chief minister, but Marie Antoinette was not the wife of that king, as we suggested in an article referring to a photograph of Conrad Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, wearing fancy dress. Marie Antoinette was the wife of Louis XVI (Do I look rich in this?, 21 July, page 9, G2). Link
An article on Friday about Japan’s Hayabusa space probe misstated the mission’s precedents. The Hayabusa was the first spacecraft to visit an asteroid and return to Earth, and it was the longest round-trip mission to outer space and back. But it was not Earth’s first visitor to an asteroid or the longest space mission yet. The article also erroneously attributed a distinction to Japan in placing a satellite in orbit. It was the fourth nation to do so, following the Soviet Union, the United States and France — not the third. (It was third, after the United States and the Soviet Union, in placing a geostationary satellite in space.) The article also misstated, in some editions, the tardiness of the Hayabusa capsule’s return; it was three years behind schedule, not two. Link
Bel-Air mansion: An article in Friday’s Section A about the Bel-Air mansion that is the most expensive sold in the U.S. this year was published with a photograph of another house and some of the details related to that house. The photo of the correct house is shown here. The exterior of the mansion does not feature more than 30,000 pieces of limestone mined in France. The entry, living room, library and master bedroom are not gilded with 24-karat gold. The home doesn’t have 90 sconces and 120 chandeliers made in France, and it does not have an average room size of about 1,100 square feet. In addition, the article said that Joyce Rey and Stacy Gottula of Coldwell Banker Beverly Hills shared the listing with Mauricio Umansky of Hilton & Hyland, Beverly Hills. Rey and Gottula had the listing alone. Link
Thanks, James and LA Observed!
In a May 28 story, msnbc.com incorrectly stated that Indiana Republican Senate candidate Dan Coats had been a lobbyist from 2000 until early this year. In fact, he was a lobbyist from 2005 until early this year.
The story incorrectly included Goldman Sachs as a firm for which Coats lobbied. In fact, the lobbying disclosure form for Coats’ former firm does not list Coats as a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs.
The story also incorrectly quoted Coats’ spokesman Pete Seat as saying, “Only one person in this race voted for the bailout, the stimulus and the health insurance bill — and that’s the incumbent Brad Ellsworth.” In fact, Seat used the phrase “health care bill,” not “health insurance bill.” Link
An obituary in some copies on May 9 about Walter J. Hickel, the former governor of Alaska and United States secretary of the interior, included several errors.
Mr. Hickel graduated from Claflin High School in Kansas; he was not a high school dropout.
The 1994 book “The Wit and Wisdom of Wally Hickel” was a collection of quotations from Mr. Hickel, not his autobiography.
After being dismissed as interior secretary and returning to Alaska, he ran for governor four more times, not three.
And while a federal judge did initially reject an agreement proposed by Governor Hickel to drop all state and federal lawsuits against Exxon in the Valdez oil spill case in exchange for the company’s paying for cleanup and restoration, a revised version of that agreement was later accepted. Link
An article on Monday about compensation paid to executives of major cultural organizations in New York and some other cities referred incorrectly to pay received recently by executives at the Metropolitan Opera and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The $1.3 million cited for Peter Gelb, general manager of the opera, reflects his total compensation, including salary, benefits and other allowances; it is not just his salary. The salaries for top executives at the Brooklyn Academy were frozen during its last fiscal year, an academy official said. They did not receive modest raises during that period.
A chart accompanying the article included outdated information about the compensation package for Zarin Mehta, the president and executive director of the New York Philharmonic. Mr. Mehta’s most recent compensation, for fiscal year 2010, is $807,500, which reflects a 5 percent pay cut taken by senior staff members last September. The $2.67 million figure in the chart was for the fiscal year ending in August 2008 and reflected his salary in addition to eight years of accumulated deferred compensation.
The chart also misstated the year for the salary figures given for Timothy Rub, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art ($450,000) and George Steel, the general manager and artistic director of New York City Opera ($360,000). They are their current salaries, not their 2008 salaries. (Both worked at other organizations in 2008.) Link
Corrections In “A Woman’s Place Is in the Church,” we reported that Timothy Dolan is a cardinal. In fact, he is archbishop of New York. In “What Went Wrong,” we mistakenly credited the portrait of Pope Benedict XVI. The painter is Suan Seh Foo. And in “Cleaning Up Dirty Police in Russia,” we reported that Vladimir Putin was Russia’s vice president. He is Russia’s prime minister. NEWSWEEK regrets the errors. Link
In early editions, a typographical error left a biographical panel about Corin Redgrave – Life and times, 7 April, page 13 – giving the actor’s birthdate as 1969, instead of 1939. In later editions, a revised version of the piece corrected this, but went on to say: “Redgrave was married twice, to Deidre Hamilton-Hill, from whom he divorced in 1981, and to Kika Markham, whom he survives.” She, of course, survives him. Our obituary (7 April, page 36) gave Corin Redgrave’s university degree as classics; that should have been English. Link
The geologist Arthur Holmes was described in the My Hero column (27 February, Review, page 5) as “a little-known scientist from a now defunct department at Nottingham University”. He was professor of geology at Edinburgh University, having previously been a lecturer at Imperial College London and reader at Durham University. A reader notes: “He has been said to be the most distinguished geologist of the 20th century – hardly a little-known scientist.” Link
February 26, 2010 – 8:00 am
There were two errors in my column for Jan. 10 — the one that began by quoting Shakespeare: “First let’s kill all the lawyers.” Contrary to appearances, Nancy Pelosi was never a lawyer. And, the U.S. Senate majority leader, though a lawyer, is not “Bill” Reid. I keep confusing him with the famous shoe bomber, and the late illustrious Haida artist, who are Bill, Dick, and Harry (in reverse order). Mea culpa! Link
This correction is a result of Media Culpa’s efforts.
February 26, 2010 – 8:00 am
A House of Delegates measure that would eliminate the Virginia Commission for the Arts in two years would take effect only if both General Assembly houses agree to make it part of the completed state budget. A headline Thursday was incorrect on this point. Also, several figures in the story and accompanying graphics were incorrect or given unclear context. The Taubman Museum of Art received $84,000 from the commission in the 2008-09 fiscal year and $96,000 in the 2009-10 fiscal year. The Roanoke Symphony Orchestra, with an operating budget of $2 million, received $96,000 in 2009-10 and anticipated receiving $84,000 in 2010-11. Opera Roanoke’s $9,000 in grants amounted to about 2.3 percent of its $390,000 budget. The $65,285 that Jefferson Center received in 2009 is 11 percent of the $551,167 contributed to the center that year, according to Jefferson Center Foundation’s chief operating officer, Kathryn Vanness. Vanness added that Jefferson Center Foundation is “not in imminent danger of going out of business.” Link
Thanks, D!
February 19, 2010 – 6:14 pm
This correction was appended the the latest edition of my weekly column for Columbia Journalism Review:
The original version of this column stated the Daily Beast used iThenticate to check Gerald Posner’s articles for plagiarism. Robert Creutz says he is unaware of the specific nature of the material the Beast was checking with the service. The lead has be changed to reflect this. A quote from him also suggested he had contacted the Beast to recommend they move to the subscription option, but Creutz says he was speaking in general and did not make a recommendation. The quote has been corrected. Finally, Associated Content was cited as an iThenticate customer. Creutz says his references to Associated Content were in the context of noting that the company is similar to Demand Media. He did not mean to imply that they were a customer. We regret the errors.
My book corrections are here. My most recent previous correction is online here.
February 9, 2010 – 8:00 am
An obituary on Jan. 29 about the author J. D. Salinger referred incorrectly to one element in the plot of his short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The character Seymour Glass commits suicide while on vacation with his wife, not while on his honeymoon. (The error also appeared in a news article on Aug. 31, 2000; a book review on Oct. 8, 2000; and in essays on March 23 and Dec. 31, 2008.) The obituary also misstated the name of the yearbook at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, for which Mr. Salinger was literary editor when he was a student there; it was Crossed Sabres, not Crossed Swords. And the obituary referred incorrectly to a work he had written while at Valley Forge. It was a poem that was later set to music; it was not a school song. Link
February 1, 2010 – 8:00 am
A story in the Play section Thursday about Transistor, an eclectic shop and hangout in Chicago, had several errors. The shop does not sell custom-crafted guitar pedals. The customer who said Transistor “is entrepreneurial, artistic activism” was incorrectly identified; the speaker was Joe Shanahan. The shop was not inspired by a visit to Berlin. And a photo caption incorrectly identified a light fixture as circa 1960s; the fixture is actually a contemporary work. Link
January 11, 2010 – 8:00 am
We described “a point on the Ataturk bridge (in Istanbul) where you can have one foot in Europe, the other in Asia. . .”, but the bridge spans the Golden Horn, not the Bosphorous. And we took 1,000 years off Aya Sofya, the Church of the Divine Wisdom, which was built in the 6th, not 16th, century. “A whirlwind for the senses” (Escape, last week). Link
January 10, 2010 – 3:05 pm
The folks at the NYTPicker, a blog that reports on the New York Times, took special notice of the corrections page in today’s paper. It is worth highlighting, as the Time published 36 corrections. (I recently profiled the NYTPicker for PBS MediaShift.)
Sunday is the biggest day for Times corrections. It’s when the paper corrects errors from the previous Sunday’s paper, which includes many special sections, as well the magazines. But, yes, 36 is a high number. From the NYTPicker:
It may or may not be a record — we don’t have the energy to plow through more than 100 years of back issues — but today’s NYT corrections column is large as any we’ve been able to find in recent memory. And it’s hard not to see the surge as a reflection of what happens to a newspaper that has lost more than 200 editorial employees to buyouts and layoffs in the last two years.
Other papers have seen an increase in corrections in the wake of layoffs and buyouts, but it’s tough to say if the number of corrections published by the Times has been on the rise. The paper uses an internal database to keep track of its corrections, so it has the data. (It’s also important to note that the number of corrections is not the same as the number of errors.)
This is the pick of the litter from today’s Times:
An article on Nov. 22 about the Dutch province of Friesland included a number of errors.
In reference to Friesland’s history, it was the feudal lords — not the Romans — who had no success conquering the Frisians in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Frisians were mostly Germanic people, not just Saxons, who had migrated there in the fourth and fifth centuries — not the first century. Friesland was considered an autonomous and proud region up to the 1500s — not “through” the Middle Ages. And it fell to the Habsburg Empire — not to the Holy Roman Empire — at the beginning of the 16th century. Also, while Friesland’s agrarian landscape is indeed dotted with terps, mounds measuring from a few to 20 feet high, terps are also found in the North Sea marshlands, encompassing parts of Holland, Germany and Denmark; the mounds are not found just in current-day Friesland.
Of the towns whose squares and alleys the writer explored, it was Stavoren — not Hindeloopen — that had a more prosperous seaport than Amsterdam up until the 1400s, not the 1700s. And the neighboring towns Stavoren and Hindeloopen, in addition to having a thriving trade with Scandinavia, also had a robust trade with the Baltic countries — but not with Russia.
A reader pointed out the errors in an e-mail message on Nov. 29; this correction was delayed for research.
January 4, 2010 – 8:00 am
An article last Sunday about the death of Edward M. Kennedy in August misstated the length of his tenure in the Senate. He served 47 years, not 46 years. (The error appeared in Mr. Kennedy’s obituary and another article, about memories of the Senator, on Aug. 27, and also in an editorial that day. The error was repeated in an article on Aug. 28 about how the Senate had changed during the time he served.) The article also referred incorrectly to the assassination of his brother President John F. Kennedy. The president was assassinated in 1963, the year after Edward Kennedy was elected to the Senate — not the same year. Link
December 9, 2009 – 8:00 am
An article in some editions on Nov. 25 about the long-term future of the New Jersey Nets misstated the year that the developer Bruce C. Ratner bought the team. It was 2004, not 2003. (The error also appeared in articles on June 5, June 29 and Sept. 24.) The article also misstated the year that the Nets originally planned to move to Brooklyn. It was as early as 2006, not in time for this season. Link
November 11, 2009 – 8:00 am
In the Nov. 7 article that ran in Globe T.O., T.o.night No Afternoon Delight, several errors were made. The newspaper consists of 30 per cent advertising, not 50 per cent as written, and most, not all, of its content comes from wire services. Its proprietor, John Cameron, attended the University of Western Ontario three years ago, not last year, and the late broadcaster Bill Cameron is his cousin, not his father’s uncle. Link
November 9, 2009 – 8:00 am
An article in some editions on Wednesday about Michael R. Bloomberg’s narrow victory in the New York mayoral race referred incorrectly to a voter who said Mr. Bloomberg “ran a smear campaign against a nonexistent opponent.” The voter, Stav Brinbaum, is a woman. The article also misstated, in some copies, the age of a second voter, Gerni Oster, who called Mr. Bloomberg “egotistical and arrogant,” and misspelled, in some copies, the given name of a professor who said she voted for Mr. Bloomberg’s Democratic rival. Ms. Oster is 32, not 34; the professor is Kathryn Krase, not Katherine. Link
October 26, 2009 – 8:00 am
An obituary said that Al Martino’s birth name was Alfred Cini Martino, that he recorded his first hit, Here in My Heart, for the Capitol record label, and that four years later (1956) his version of Volare was released. He was actually born Alfred Cini, recorded Here in My Heart for a small independent company called BBS, and released Volare in 1975 (15 October, page 36). Link
October 19, 2009 – 8:00 am
Errors appeared in an interview with Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, who own Frieze magazine and the events company that stages the Frieze art fair. In connection with part of the piece that quoted them talking about founding the contemporary art magazine, it has been pointed out to us that the masthead of the first edition of Frieze in 1991 listed the founding editors as the artist Tom Gidley and Matthew Slotover, and Amanda Sharp as advertising and PR. Elsewhere in our article, the 2005 figure of £2.5m should have been given as the art fair’s turnover – fees from visitors and exhibitors – not as its profit; the height of its tent walls should have been given as 12ft not 12m. Amanda Sharp’s surname sometimes appeared wrongly in the piece as Smart (All the fun of the fair, 3 October, page 34). Link
September 25, 2009 – 8:00 am
The article “Beware of Big Ideas: Newly nervous post-Soviet states crack down on Western schools” (Aug. 10 & 17) contained several errors. The article stated that the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research (known as KIMEP) recently laid off 30 professors. The correct number is 20. The article also stated that KIMEP spent $10 million on a new building this year. In fact, the building was completed last year. Finally, the name of the school’s vice president is Habib Rahman, not Khalib Rakhman, as stated in our article, and our reporters did not speak to him for the story. NEWSWEEK sincerely regrets the errors.
September 11, 2009 – 8:00 am
Ashcroft ruling: An article on Saturday’s Page A1 about a federal appeals court ruling involving former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft inaccurately described the breadth of the court’s decision and mischaracterized some elements of the case. The 2-1 ruling by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday held that Ashcroft could be sued personally for allegedly violating the constitutional rights of a Muslim man, Abdullah Kidd, who was detained after the Sept. 11 attacks. The opening paragraph of the article incorrectly said that the court held that Ashcroft had “violated the rights of U.S. citizens.” The appeals court did not decide that question. Instead, the judges ruled that Ashcroft could be held personally liable if Kidd’s allegations proved true. They sent the case back to a lower court for a trial to determine whether the allegations were accurate.
The allegations involve Kidd’s arrest under a federal law that allows officials to detain witnesses in criminal cases whose testimony is needed and who might otherwise flee before a trial. Kidd alleges that Ashcroft adopted a policy that authorized officials to deliberately misuse the material-witness law to detain people the government lacked probable cause to arrest. The court ruled that such a policy — if it existed — would violate the Constitution.
The article also compared the alleged material-witness arrests to another Bush administration anti-terrorism policy, the seizure of suspects outside the U.S., and in doing so referred to both types of arrests as “secret.” Kidd’s arrest and detention were not secret. The article quoted one portion of the ruling, which sharply criticized those who “confidently assert” that the government has the power to detain people on material-witness warrants, but it incorrectly attributed the quotation to “the panel,” rather than to the two judges in the majority. Moreover, the article described the judges as having aimed their criticism at the Bush administration’s policies. Although that was the clear implication of the judges’ words, they never directly named the targets of their criticism, and the article should have made clear that the criticism of the administration was implied, not stated.
Finally, the article quoted two constitutional scholars as praising the ruling, but failed to note that both of them had previously been on record as criticizing Bush administration policies in the area of civil liberties. The article should have included a broader range of reaction to the decision. Link
September 9, 2009 – 8:00 am
There are a few corrections that need to be made regarding two stories in the August, 2009 edition featuring Newco Tank Corp.
The first story, “All systems are go for launch of patented Newco tank,” page C11, spoke about Newco’s new production tank design that features the engine package inside the tank, and using its heat to heat the oil in the tank.
The price as quoted was $110,000. That was incorrect. It should have read, “The Newco tank comes with a lease site set up cost of $165,000. That is considerably more than a conventional tank but with virtually no propane costs or harmful emissions overall operating costs are much lower.”
The payback is six to 12 months, not less than six months, as stated.
When compared to a worst case scenario, with a tank operating inefficiently at high temperatures, the Newco tank in comparison would result in a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions the equivalent of taking 200 to 300 vehicles off the road. That was the number we stated. However, for a tank operating at 70 C, the GHG reduction is closer to 38 to 158 vehicles.
The first prototype was initially worked on in 2002, not 2004.
The company is seeking to design a two-1000 barrel tank setup, consisting of a production tank and sales tank on a single site, not a 2000-bbl. tank.
In the second story, “Nordic cuts operating costs with the leased ‘green’ Newco tank,” pages c12-c13, it stated, “Newco plans to
drill one or two more wells in the area before the fourth quarter but [Matthew] Barnard cautions Nordic is, ‘anxiously waiting for the price of oil to go up.’”
That should have read, “Nordic Oil and Gas plans to drill one or two more wells in the area before the fourth quarter but [Matthew] Barnard cautions Nordic is, ‘anxiously waiting for the price of oil to go up.’”
Pipeline News regrets the errors and any confusion it may have caused.
This appears on page A6 of the Sept. 2009 issue of Pipeline News, which can be downloaded as a PDF here.
