Sloppy SI

I've only gotten through to the start of the Mannings story and I've already found two, while nit-picky, ridiculous errors in stories.

In an item on New Mexico State, it says the Aggies broke their losing streak against Division I-AA Southern Louisiana, a school that does indeed not exist. It's Southeastern Louisiana.

In the item on the Clemson kid taking in his kid brother, it says that Clemson beat Florida International in its opener last week. Later in the TV section, the magazine correctly reports that Clemson beat Florida Atlantic.

SI, you have how many copy editors? Cripes, get the shit right. This is part of the reason people think SI has sunk to lows never before imaginable. Those are errors that 40K circ newspapers would catch.

[/rant over]

 

Glad Mr. Perfect could chime in.

No matter how established, how compensated and how talented you are in this business, you will fuck up.

 

We shouldn't tolerate those sorts of mistakes from the industry's leading magazine. It ain't about being perfect. I'm not.

EDIT: FWIW, Steve Rushin's column this week was tremendous.

 

I know you're sincere in this thought (though possibly exaggerating a little . . . one mistake in two years???).

But consider . . .

--- There is about 300% more content in SI today than there was when I was a kid. Everything from stories to sidebars to cutlines to brites to briefs and the whole shebang. There's just more. A lot more. More content + same deadlines = more mistakes. It's a mathematical certainty.

--- If you were a kid back in 1975 and wanted to "check" and see if Clemson really did beat FIU last week, what would you do? Go round up a Sunday paper from 5 days ago? Probably you would do nothing. You would just assume it was correct, because you couldn't possibly check every fact and things weren't as easy to check back then as they are now. Of course, things are also easier for copy editors to check, too. But "Clemson beat FIU" doesn't exactly raise a red flag with me. And the only reason I would recognize the mistake is because I live in FAU and FIU's area. If I didn't, I doubt I would have caught it as a copy editor.

And speaking of errors . . .

Newsweek did a business article on the Arizona Cardinals this week. In said article they referred to the "Indiana" Colts and hyphenated the word "play-offs".

Nobody's perfect.

 

If these teams ever won anything, people would start getting their names right.

Bottom line, though, they should catch some of that silly shit.

 

Cosmo and Moddy are dead on here.

With the staff that SI has, a lot of these errors should be caught. Not only with the copy editors, but they also have a bunch of reporters. Check out the masthead. You have the senior writers, who get the bylined stories. But there are a good number of reporters and reporter-writers underneath that.

Those are the ones who should be fact checking and making sure these don't get in.

 

Baloney. The page count of today's SI is probably half of what it was in the 1970s.

 

I agree with most of your post, but 40K newspapers are among the worst with fact-checking. More work than a smaller paper and more pressure to contain costs lead to slipshod work.

 

Didn't read Rushin yet this week. Did he mention he married Lobo, or is the next reference coming next week?

 

Yes.

 

Overemphasis on speed (most important) . . . and too many kids, with insufficient background/seasoning . . .
do it, every time . . .