This is what happens when I don’t pay attention to my web stats: the New York Times’s “The Lede” blog linked to me on Thursday evening, bringing in a bunch of extra traffic — nearly a third of my last 4,000 hits have come via the NYT post — but I didn’t notice till just now. (The post references my coverage of the alleged Harry Potter spoiler, and links to my “That Which Must Not Be Blogged” post. The body of the NYT post doesn’t contain any Potter spoilers, but I can’t vouch for the comments or the other linked URLs.)
Anyway, it seems the New York Times has a serious problem with the spelling of my name. You may recall that my name was spelled “Brendon Loy” in the Times print edition on Sept. 6, 2005, in a correction to a rather more significant error in the previous day’s Times article about my Katrina coverage (the article had mixed up the first names of my wife and my dog). This resulted in the highly amusing spectacle of a correction-to-the-correction regarding the misspelling of my name. Well, now the Times has found a new way to misspell my name: Thursday’s blog post says I’m “Brenden Loy.”
I’m not terribly sensitive to misspellings and mispronounciations of my name — I’m accustomed to them, and will generally not bother to correct people who call me “Brandon” or the like, let alone get offended by their error — but for f***’s sake, the Times’s link goes to a domain called brendanloy.com, and the byline says the post in question is “by Brendan Loy.” In fact, my first name appears nine separate times on the linked page, spelled correctly in each instance. Is it that hard to copy-and-paste the correct spelling into your article?
P.S. Not related to the Times, but while I’m on the topic of misspellings, who could forget this:
Heh.
You know, when I was in journalism school at USC, I once got a zero on an assignment that I’d spent an entire week (and an enormous amount of emotional energy) working on — traveling all around the L.A. area, interviewing the wife of a murder victim, even attending the man’s funeral, all to write an article about the murder for Aaron Curtiss’s reporting class — because I misspelled a proper noun in the article. Just one proper noun. The name of a city or bridge or somesuch, as I recall. Because of that one mistake, all my effort was wasted. Methinks some New York Times (and MSNBC) journalists could use a little bit of Curtiss-style training.
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Categories: The Media & Blogs, Website News
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June 23rd, 2007 at 8:43:23 pm
Leanna says:
But do misproNUNciations bother you? :)
oxo
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:33:26 pm
4-7 just saw Pirates 3. That was freaking awesome. nay to the naysayers. awesome.
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:57:47 pm
Just because of the misspellings and, in the interests of good fun, I decided to go to the Internet Anagram Server to run a search on possible alternatives our friends in the MSM might want to try if they don’t care about getting it completely right, using just “Brendan Loy.” Here are a few of my faves…
Blarney Don (blarney’s pretty Irish, huh?)
Rayon Blend (always comfy)
Nab Red Only (once you go red…)
Bra End Only (Ok, it’s a bra. That’s nice)
Laden By Nor (sounds like some LOTR something or other)
Lard By Neon (since when is lard NOT funny?)
Darn Be Only (darn be only WHAT?…whatever, it’s still good)
La Bonny Red (a cheerful Irish nickname for ya), and
Nary Bled On (resilient lad that you are), but, of course, the very best one of the 270 results given, and what our humble leader should use as a tagline under the blog title…[drumroll, please…]
ABLY NERD ON
May the news media, a career from which you miraculously escaped, always favor you with positive coverage, Brandelory.
June 23rd, 2007 at 11:21:35 pm
Brandon Loy? Sweet! That’s my first name! ;)
See, we’re really only two letters off on our first names.
June 24th, 2007 at 12:09:21 am
It is hard to fathom what is more pervasive lately: the NYT’s sloppiness or its painstaking, agenda-driven stupidity (see Duff Wilson’s articles re the Duke fraud).
June 24th, 2007 at 3:33:05 am
I understand the need to be accurate is important, but a zero for one mispelling? Talk about anal retentive…
June 24th, 2007 at 11:08:57 am
I was thinking the same thing as David. Do you happen to know if that sort of thing is common to journalism schools, common to the USC journalism school in particular, or just a policy of that particular journalism professor? Because it seems absurd, and suggests some screwed up priorities for teaching students how to be good journalists.
June 24th, 2007 at 11:20:22 am
After further thought… Can a simple misspelled proper noun expose a newspaper to a libel suit? I wouldn’t have thought so, but if that is the case I suppose it might explain a fixation on spelling.
June 24th, 2007 at 11:25:32 am
Uh! Your hair looks so freakin long in that MSNBC clip! You should listen to your wife when she tells you that you need a haircut!
June 24th, 2007 at 10:00:23 pm
You’re quite right as usual, Rebukea ;}.
Atty. Jay Johnstown: LOL!!! Wonderful. :)
Dear Loy, Brenda L.:
Oh, quit your whining.
Very truly yours,
~ The Newington Board of Education
:)
June 24th, 2007 at 11:04:21 pm
PS ~ in reply to Sister LuAnn Lemur, #1 above: you leave the Nuns out of this, Rav Leander, they’re just minding their own Wimples. / Therefore get thee to a Nounery, babe, wherein to Look to thine own adoptive Mamaloshen: 3 Yiddishists, 7 Opinions. :}
[Oy, I’m gonna pay Dearly for that “babe” part; but it’ll be Worth it. :]