The News in 2018 Was Memorable. So Were These Corrections.

Loved it!

Are Corrections important? YES, so why are they lately “buried.” Not long ago Corrections were prominent on page two or three. I noted this to my students for years. Please restore Corrections to their proper place. Such as that now occupied by Here to Help, pg 3.

Speaking of Phil Corbett, there hasn't been a "Copy Edit This" quiz for two months! I'm going through withdrawal.

I wonder if anyone made that recipe with vinegar instead of lemon juice, and what they thought of it...?

Nice pat on your own back at the end of the year, NYT. Unfortunately the Times seems to be uninterested in correcting errors when there is too much work involved, as I found out. Two examples: dead fish and dead Weimar Republic foreign ministers. In the story on 'How to Move 2.8 Million Dead Fish,' December 23, 2018, Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied was described as a "naturalist who went on a stagecoach and steamboat expedition to the western United States in the 1830s." He was also described as having presided over a small German state. And being the eighth child. Having studied history and other things that seem pretty much useless these days, and having worked as a fact checker for publishers, this set my antennae quivering: a ruler of even a postage stamp sized principality going abroad on an expedition for what amounted to three years, according to the linked older NYT piece? Not only that, he had already spent more than two years exploring Brazil from 1815, and his father had died in 1809? So would he have been leaving behind what was essentially a full time job even in that postage stamp sized principality, and all the political machinations that went on at the time? (A very quick dip into the Internet showed that the von Wied-Neuwieds were not exactly a nice lot: they had tried to declare his father insane over an unorthodox yet rather quite enlightened scheme to pay off his debts.)

NYT has my respect. Keep up the good work.

Within minutes of reading this article, I saw this in the Real Estate section, describing an apartment for sale on the Upper East Side: "PROS There are flour closets. The building allows pieds-à-terre, and foreigners can buy. The price is low for a historic building on an exclusive street." Well, I guess that would be a plus if the buyer were a professional baker. @Darren Huff: I am a freelance copy editor. and proofreader Every day, reading the Times I toggle between wincing and thanking my stars that I was not the one who let things like the above go through. (My worst public oops came due to a Simon Schama book in which I neglected to follow my instinct and check for all the authors of a book he cited, one that I had even read. As it happened, he left out the name of one. Wouldn't you know that the daily reviewer in the Times noticed? That keeps me humble.)

Fun to read your self-deprecating humor. Laughed out loud. I’m an editor.

5/5 Call me paranoid, but I'm going to copy this to a few journalists I know, including at the Times, because somehow I feel that otherwise this will never see the light of day in the comments section.

4/5 What is not amusing in the least is when the Times cannot be bothered to correct quite obvious falsehoods, such as the murder of the Weimar Republic foreign minister Walter Rathenau on 22 June 1922. In ‘Genius’, April 17, 2017, the Times has Rathenau killed off "by a gang of Nazis." This is just ludicrously wrong unless you want to describe anyone murderous with politically right wing intent, even if they were not a member of the Nazi party, as a Nazi, when at the time the party was so tiny that it started membership with No. 500, and Adolf Hitler was given the membership number 555. The real danger to democracy at that point in the Weimar Republic stemmed from the Freikorps, ultra-nationalists with close connections to the Reichswehr, who had already tried to overthrow the democratically elected government by force. Foreign minister Rathenau was murdered by Organisation Consul, a Freikorps group that murdered at least 354 people for political reasons between 1919 and 1922. What is beyond mind blowingly annoying, is that the Times has articles about all of that in its own archive, describing the trials, naming the murderers, accessible by a Google search. When I pointed out the error in an email at the time I even went one step further, and gave links to official German state archives, which are not hard to find if you are a halfway experienced researcher. The error was never corrected, and at the time of my writing, Walter Rathenau was murdered by a Nazi gang.

3/5 Then he was the eighth child. Now, child mortality in those days was high, but he would have been extremely (un)lucky for all his older brothers to predecease him. And, of course, they didn't. His older brother, Johann August Karl Fürst zu Wied (May 26, 1779 - April 21, 1836), inherited the (exceedingly small) principality and the title Fürst, which confusingly enough translates to Prince in English. As the son, and later the younger brother of a Fürst, Maximilian Alexander Philipp Prinz zu Wied-Neuwied (September 23, 1782 - February 3, 1867) carried the German courtesy title Prinz, which also translates as Prince in English, of course. Johann August Karl had a son, who inherited the title and the principality, and so on, and Maximilian Alexander Philipp, to no doubt his great relief, was able to spend his money on travelling, collecting specimens, and writing books. Now, somewhere in the bowels of the Times one would expect that there is a hardcover copy of the Gotha -- where my non-Jewish maternal great aunt can be found -- which is the German equivalent of Debrett's Peerage. There the von Wied-Neuwieds's history could have been confirmed quite easily. But I guess that instead of doing something imaginative, some researcher followed the link in the article to the U.S. Department of Agriculture page where the same wrong story is told. The chicken and egg question arises: who cribbed from whom? Now all of that is quite amusing in a 'The Student Prince' vein.

I appreciate the fact that the Times includes the error as well as the correction. Some other news outlets do not.

So you accused an entire species of cannibalism, when in fact their worst offense was necrowphilia.

Please bring back your copy editors. My friends and I spot and share errors daily. We're embarrassed and disappointed for you even if you're not. ...and it's not funny, either. I'm confident there are many of us happy to wait a little while longer for a well-edited article. I'd happily pay another $5 per month with like-minded subscribers for you to bring back your copy editors and offer a "Slightly Delayed but Readable" subscription tier. (Please.)

You actually wildly overstated the odds against winning the Powerball jackpot, not the odds OF winning.

Your correction article has a large mistake! Your error is a wild UNDERSTATEMENT of the odds against winning the Powerball. You did not overstate the odds of winning the Powerball. One in 292,201,338 is much better odds than one in 292,201,338 million. Or, alternatively, you might have correctly written that you "wildly understated the odds of winning the Powerball"

Pope: "to err is human; to forgive, divine". I really appreciate the attention to detail in the NY Times. Quality journalism is the lifeblood of intelligent conversation and learning about our society!

My all-time favourite correction appeared in the Globe and Mail, Canada's would-be NYT, when I was a reporter there: "The recipe for trifle in yesterday's (Globe and Mail) should have said '4 to 8' ounces of sherry, not 48 ounces."

To err is human. Look at the "president".