The Simmons Site

$10 million in advertising is great. It definitely lets you know who the most valuable sportswriter in the country is.

 

I'm with dooley and DD. On the day it launched, I found numerous errors/typos. Nothing that would damage a site, but enough to make me catch myself as it read. I wrote someone I know at ESPN.com and was told they have their own editing team. So I couldn't really forward stuff. I offered to do it on a freelance basis.

 

Oh, those pesky facts.

 

I just want to double back a second and make sure there are people on here self-identifying as journalists who are claiming that facts don't matter. Is that correct?

 

No I don't think that is correct. I don't think anyone's said facts don't matter. And everyone agrees there's a greater need for editing on the site, whether copyediting or otherwise. The question is the overall impact of the mistakes. Do you see the mistake and completely discount everything else about the story? Do you not trust anything in the story? Do you consider them fairly minor in the big picture? Do you think there's been a lot of really good stories - some that even contain factual errors - and think that's okay, while acknowledging the need to clean up things a bit? Those have been the discussions. Not a simplistic "facts don't matter."

 

Yes. As in everything else, it's not a black-and-white issue. There's grey in there, too.

Are factual errors bad? Of course they're bad.

Are they going to make me stop reading a story I want to read?

If you can't allow for that, then yeah, I think you're being a little stiff about it.

 

I absolutely turn a very jaundiced eye to a story that starts springing fact leaks. There was a book that I was reading in which a footnote contained Astros when it should have been Rockets. Why the hell should I take much of anything at face value from the author after that?

 

We're going to have to agree to disagree on this one.

 

The best newspaper in the world (now that News of the World will be closing) has numerous mistakes every day, which you can see recounted in the paper's own pages the following day. And some of the mistakes are ones that would make Grantland copy editors say, "Man, how do you miss that?"

Is everything in the paper discounted because of its corrections page?

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/pageoneplus/corrections.html

Obviously some people say yes. I don't. Doesn't mean I think facts don't matter.

Maybe, as Deadspin has suggested, Grantland should have its own corrections page or acknowledge somewhere, like Slate does, that earlier versions had x and x mistakes.

We talked about this before (actually during a discussion about Simmons's book and the mistakes in it. Hi Boom), but even a book like The Echoing Green has several errors. That's a book universally applauded for the research that went into it and for Prager's attention to detail. I love the book. But a friend of mine had a real tough time with some of the mistakes, specifically the ones that talked about St. John's University, where Thomson was at briefly and where we went to school. Several really basic mistakes about the campus that might make you wonder what else was wrong, despite all the stunning research. But they didn't ruin the book for me. Just as the errors - especially something like 48-1, which, as Mizzou pointed out, would be technically accurate depending on the date you're talking about - on Grantland haven't ruined the entire site for me.

Clean them up? Of course. Absolutely. Acknowledge them on their own page? Probably a good idea. Discount everything or avoid the site because of them? Me? No.

 

I'd like to think we can all acknowledge, also, there are differences between cosmetic mistakes and "mistake" mistakes.

As in, if it's a mistake I notice but would not call a page back for on deadline? I don't hold those against anyone. And a big chunk of the Deadspin list are cosmetic mistakes.

That said, they need to clean it up. Badly.

Great news that it's turning a profit already, though. Great news.

 

I know its not his problem, and I know he shouldn't care, and I even know that part of the equation is jealousy. Nevertheless, if the most famous and profitable sportswriter doesn't care about facts....well to me that says the state of our business is just as bad its been made out to be. Maybe worse. And even though he's laughing all the way to the bank, the factual errors make him every bit the fraud some think he is.

It is a frustraing dichotomy because if you look at fame, dollars, cents and success Simmons wins over all the snarky fact checking critics. Yet the facts in the stories are wrong, period, and in basic journalism we're taught that getting it right is what's most important.

So really, this is the lesson that everybody in the business picks up at the some point, on a giant scale. That the ideals really don't add up to a hill of beans today. As a young guy, I kind of wonder if they ever did.

 

Take a look at Slate.com (corrected, I originally cited Salon.com) for the right way to handle website corrections.

Funny, but the footnote technology offers the perfect way to handle rolling corrections.

The best, easiest way to catch mistakes, though, is at the headwater. Writers -- especially those who are very, very, very well compensated - need to take ownership of their own content. That Simmons himself seems a bit cavalier about the issue is worrisome.