Miscues In Philly

Lately the miscues in Philadelphia haven't been limited to those being made on the field by the team that plays its home games at Citizens Bank Park. No, they're happening in the media coverage of that team too. Behold the below screen shot taken from the Philly.com sports page on Monday, June 15th. On the left is the beautiful sight of Jimmy Rollins swatting a homer into the right field seats. On the right is a typo of first-grade ineptitude.


It's a tease for this article that appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News just after the Phillies salvaged the last of a three-game series with the Boston Red Sox by defeating the "Sawx" 11-6. As you can see highlighted above, there's an extraneous T in the word "the." The capital T belongs there, but the lower-case T immediately following it is clearly unnecessary and should've been caught by a proofreader before being published. Hopefully the Phillies and the Philly sports media can get things turned around--pronto!

Punctuation Problems At Post Continue

A couple of weeks ago the New York Post screwed up Yankees' pitcher A.J. Burnett's E.R.A. by placing a colon rather than a decimal point in the number. The other day the Post forgot to place an apostrophe in a contraction that appeared in a review of Conan O'Brien's first episode as host of NBC's Tonight show. The mistake was submitted by the Proofreader's good friend, and a very funny guy, Adam Wade.

The mistake appeared on page 34 of the June 2nd edition of the paper, in the third-to-last line of the article, as you can see highlighted in the picture above. In a review that critiqued Conan for being "unfunny," the Post, in a funny display of incompetence for a professional news publication, made a stupid error . The Post forgot to type an apostrophe in the contraction won't, which resulted in the word "wont."

This mistake was of the double-threat variety, as it appeared in the printed paper and, as of this post, still exists online as you can see here or in the below screen shot.

The Proofreader thanks Adam Wade for submitting the mistake.

Extraneous Word In Times Article About Leno

Well, Leno's officially gone from late night TV, but not to worry. The McDonald's of comedians will be back in a few months with a new, prime-time show. Yesterday, The New York Times ran an interesting story on its Web site analyzing what Leno's move to five-nights-a-week in prime-time might mean for the medium of television...besides more watered-down, hacky jokes and boring interviews. And, in the article, the Times left an extra word, perhaps from a previous draft, in a sentence.

The extra word occurs in the last line of the story's fifth paragraph, as you can see in the highlighted screen shot above. It seems like this sentence may have been re-worked during editing and a vestige of the old phrasing didn't get deleted. The sentence reads, "...then NBC will be left scrambling to find fill five prime-time hours a week." That "find" preceding "fill" doesn't make any sense.

Perhaps they should've simply omitted "find" or added an "er" to "fill" and followed it with the word "for," so the sentence would've read, "to find filler for five prime-time hours a week." That would've been less efficient, but at least it would have made sense.

As of now, this mistake has not been corrected on the Web site. Plus, this isn't the first time the Times has made an error in its Leno coverage. The Proofreader caught a factual inaccuracy in an article last December, which was distributed to many other news services.