OT: another Strib flub

[tjgopher]

Not a big deal, but I was reading the article that Twins writer LaVelle E. Neal III wrote previewing the Iowa Hawkeye football team. He writes this:

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Then quarterback Ricky Stanzi was crunched in the end zone on Nov. 7 against Northwestern and rolled his right ankle. Stanzi, who needed surgery, hasn't played -- and the Hawkeyes haven't won -- since then. Once ranked as high as fourth in the country, they are out of the Top 25.
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What Top 25 is he talking about? Iowa is ranked #15 in the AP poll, #15 in the coaches poll, #13 in the BCS poll, #14 in the Harris Interactive poll, #11 in the CBS PowerRankings, and basically in that same range in any other poll available.

Do the writers over there ever check their facts? Does anyone over there follow college football? Anyone?

 

[GophersInIowa]

I'm guessing he meant to say Top 10

 

[GopherHomer]

I think he should be fired. Oh, wait...I forgot we're only supposed to hold Brewster to that standard

 

[Schnoodler]

I like LEN3, but he is a baseball guy, so I will cut him some slack.

 

[tjgopher]

I'm guessing he meant to say Top 10

Maybe. But, I'm guessing he totally swung and missed on it (to use a baseball term he'd understand). Why would he even use the term Top Ten? Why not simply write - "once rated as high as fourth in the country, the Hawkeyes have fallen to 15th in both major polls."

 

[Khaliq]

I blame the editor more than the writer for something like that. Flubs like that are inevitable. You have editors and proofreaders in place to catch that.

 

[monk10]

Does an editor fact check things like that. I don't know since I've never worked in a paper. I thought they were more like, you rambled here, your grammer is wrong here, you don't have a point, your column is too long, you haven't banged on the gophers enough...stuff like that.

 

[tjgopher]

Does an editor fact check things like that. I don't know since I've never worked in a paper. I thought they were more like, you rambled here, your grammer is wrong here, you don't have a point, your column is too long, you haven't banged on the gophers enough...stuff like that.

You are correct. The copy editor is there to look for sentence structure, story flow, punctuation, typos, grammar, etc. The reporter's job is to get the facts correct. A copy editor simply doesn't have time to go through every little stat in a story. If an editor has to look up things like whether Iowa is in the Top 25, etc., in every story, they'd never finish. They have to literally edit thousands of words per night. The writer's job is to make sure the facts are right. Certainly, a good editor would recognize this mistake, but at the end of the day, this is on the writer, not the editor.