Mind That Bird

In the Houston Chronicle today, Kentucky Derby winner Mine That Bird was misspelled Mind That Bird when listing the Preakness field and their odds despite being next to an article that had Mine That Bird in the subhead.

I was curious to see how many “Mind That Bird” typos there were so I searched the exact phrase in Google and came back with 63,500 results.

Some of the highlights:

Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/02/AR2009050202294.html

The Star-Ledger
http://www.nj.com/sports/ledger/izenbergcol/index.ssf/2009/05/rachel_alexandra_is_filly_wort.html

Idaho Statesman
http://www.idahostatesman.com/NationalSports/story/769621.html

The Idaho Statesman hasn’t run the photo correction as evidenced by The Boston Globe.
http://www.boston.com/sports/other_sports/horse_racing/articles/2009/05/13/rachel_alexandra_adds_girl_power_to_preakness/

Of course given the state of the industry, none of this is surprising as editing goes by the wayside and we all know the daily struggle with terribly written photo captions.

 

Strange thing about Google, if you misspell a name, it brings up stories spelling the name the way you did it....for instance, try "Lary Bird".....or "Min That Bird"

 

This is a common mistake that is not caused by the industry's current woes. You'll find simple mistakes like this throughout the history of newspapers. Care to guess how many times Bill Bidwill's name has been misspelled?

 

Made that very mistake when covering my first Cardinals training camp ...

 

couldn't disagree more

there've always been typos and spelling errors

the fewer deskers you have, the fewer errors get caught

do you actually believe layoffs and cutbacks haven't hurt the quality of editing and copyediting and proofreading?

 

It's a question of degree, and the issues have clearly multipled, exponentially. SI is as good an example as you will find.

 

Hopefully, these stories weren't doing lame comparisons to Seebiscuit.

 

I believe calling the horse Mind That Bird is the kind of error that has happened since the first newspaper was printed off.

 

The gelding is fuckin' pissed, too.
First, pissed about being a gelding. (This would generally piss anyone off).
Secondly...Well, I can't get past the first one.

 

I don't really mine the error.