Dallas Morning News Vilifies Jay-Z

One of the side-effects of the ever-changing media landscape is that various media companies are increasingly operating outside of their comfort zones. Instead of plodding away in the niches they've mastered over a great many years, some media companies think that because the Internet exists, they have a license to dabble willy-nilly in all kinds of newfangled media. The Dallas Morning News launched in print in 1885. Now, 125 years later, the newspaper is dabbling in video content--and screwing up as the discerning eye of Stan Kost recently revealed.

In an e-mail, Kost wrote the Proofreader:

I don't think that Jay-Z is a comic book villain, but The Dallas Morning News may think so. In a recent video about LeBron James and Jay-Z, the latter is described as a "Music mongul" - I'm sure that they meant "mogul". After all, Mongul is this comic book villain.

As you can see in the screen shot highlighted above, The Dallas Morning News F'd up the word mogul in the video's lower third. Stan--you, the Proofreader, any other individual with the smallest grain of cultural literacy and even (as evidenced by the caption in the above screen shot) The Dallas Morning News knows that Jay-Z is a music mogul, not a tyrannical comic book villain (though parallels between the two could certainly be drawn--fodder for a different blog) as this silly typo suggests.

The lesson that should be heeded here, by all newspapers trying to produce video content and by traditional T.V. news outlets, is to proofread those lower thirds and other graphics like it's your job, because, guess what? It is.

The Proofreader thanks Stan Kost for submitting the mistake.