Really, Chicago Tribune? Really?

Purportedly, a great word that doesn't get used enough. 8)

As for this ``busting it every day to make it right and make it great,'' it seems rather clear that making it right is challenge enough and making it great is long gone at Tribune.

Either that, or the phrase was lifted from a Lee Abrams memo.

 

You probably won't see this, but:
No, I don't get bent about mistakes being made. Everybody makes mistakes. But to have it up for 11 hours????
My comments were more about the state of the biz, and your site's mistake brought it into focus. I see it daily on my paper's site, too, and it pisses me off no end. And management doesn't care. Quality is obsolete.
In my opinion, you shouldn't butcher a person who made the mistake. Point it out, yeah, tell them to do better next time, yeah. But maybe you ought to go after those who set up the system -- that would be management -- that allows a mistake to go on the site and stay there for 11 hours.
Props to you for coming here and fessing up. Better people than me are using pseudonyms and it wouldn't be prudent to ID myself at this time. Someday, I'll be here with my real name ... probably sooner than later.

 

SoCal, when you see that kind of mistake on your paper's site, what do you do?
Do you e-mail the internet pepople and suggest they correct it?

I wonder how no one at the Trib didn't point out the mistake to someone in the internet group so they could correct it...in less than 11 hours.

 

At my place, figuring out who to contact is often tricky. Yes, when I see something really bad, I point it out. I'm told that once the fixes are made, it can take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes for the site to update. That's reasonable. What is unreasonable is the volume of mistakes. Again, the state of the biz ...

 

Just for the slightest bit of perspective, we're staffed pretty much 24/7 except for a few hours on the weekends, and we have plenty of people with journalism backgrounds -- some have 30 years' worth, and at some pretty big places (that would be me) -- and we have had some glaring mistakes on the site for 11 hours or more. And it certainly wasn't because somebody didn't care or wasn't working hard. I'm with Mike; shit happens.

The underlying assumption of some on this thread that that attitude means we don't care is simply wrong. No, that attitude is reality. We're producing hundreds of pages a day, they're being linked across more than a dozen arenas, some are read more regularly by more people than others. In fact, these kinds of errors stand out less on the web than in print, not more.

Interestingly, the message boards and feedback systems that some here hate help us catch a lot of errors.

I repeat my story to finish my point, redundant or no: I once spelled memento wrong -- in 42 point type -- on 1A -- in what at the time was one of the best edited major metros in the world -- and it wasn't caught -- despite proofs being pulled and read for each edition -- for three editions.

Finally, the toughest errors to catch sometimes are the ones where one real name has been written in place of another.

None of this excuses any of these errors being made (I have a blog poster who will be poised to rip me if he reads this). Mike wasn't making excuses. He simply said the truth: This kind of thing happens, and it has happened, in our business for years and years and years.

 

I hadn't seen a print copy of the Tribune in a long time and was stunned at how low rent the product looks.
Awful.
The Website is quite dynamic.
The print edition ... wow, low quality look.

 

Couldn't disagree more. But I'm sure it's the guys in the 10 a.m. meetings fault, right Fredrick?

 

Should that be true, the Tribune is about a lap ahead of the rest of the field in the copy-editing of newspaper Web sites.

And yet ...