Last month we took copy editors at the Washington Post to task for managing to add — thanks to a miswritten blurb on washingtonpost.com — one million people to the nation’s tally of illegal immigrants with a single mouse click.
This morning we spied another perplexing mathematical error on the homepage of a large newspaper — this time on SFGate.com, which bills itself as “the leading news and information Web site for the San Francisco Bay Area.”
There, nestled among the site’s lead set of stories, we came across a San Francisco Chronicle article on Babe Ruth headlined, “Babe ‘Bigger Than He Was Alive.'” Fair enough — except that the story’s blurb curiously declared, “It may be 70+ years since he died, but Babe Ruth is still a uniquely powerful U.S. icon.”
The problem? Ruth died in 1948 — which (even before coffee) we were able to deduce was 58 years ago.
The source of the confusion appears to have been the story’s fifth paragraph, which began thus: “More than 70 years after his last game and nearly 60 years after his death, Ruth remains uniquely powerful.” That’s accurate, and much further down the story explained how “throat cancer took [Ruth] at age 53 in August 1948.”
So the dates of Ruth’s retirement and death were transposed — happens to the best of us sometimes.
But that wasn’t the only odd mistake plaguing the online presentation of Chronicle staff writer Ron Kroichick’s otherwise enjoyable piece on the Sultan of Swat’s legacy, as we discovered.
Take another look at that headline on the page carrying the article itself:
Records may fall, but the Babe endures
Bonds’ pregame scare
(“Bonds’ pregame scare” appears to refer to a piece by Bruce Jenkins describing a “just plain freaky” beaning of Bonds before a game in Milwaukee yesterday — possible evidence, Jenkins suggests, of the reemergence of Ruth’s famous curse.)
Later this morning, the Chronicle corrected its homepage miscue surrounding Ruth’s death — though not before we, and probably scads more hardball fans in the Bay Area, were thrown for a mystifying little loop. But, at latest reading, it was still going with that murky headline that suggests that either Ruth, or Bonds, or both, are capable of time travel.
Publishing on the Web is quite wonderful; newspapers can, and often do, double their audience by doing so. It’s also quite hair-raising — because apparently it doubles your chances of getting something wrong.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.