Wednesday 28 July 2010

Say what?

A TSF reader up Sudbury way says Sun Media editors must have been sleeping at the wheel with this story.

The July 24 Sudbury Star story is about a Timmins event scheduled for July 18.

Better late than never? Not in this case.

The tipster said: "I want to share with you a clipping from last Saturday's Sudbury Star. I don't know how it happened, but my hometown paper ran an advancer for an event that had occurred a week earlier - and in another city.

"Could this be the product of overworked editors, or out-of-town paginators?"

8 comments:

  1. It's typical work by untrained, unskilled staff at the so called centres of excellence.

    I know one guy who got hired with absolutely no writing or journalism experience. He had graphics training.

    His response:
    "I don't know a lick about writing, or sentence structure or anything. We're just told to make it fit."

    Might explain why on a daily basis memos are sent out that PDFs have errors, if they get caught because the pages are never spell-checked before shipped out to the other papers.

    PKP must be proud of his product.

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  2. My guess is the eds would have earmarked the story on Sun's shared content system when it appeared, then when a paginator at a Centre Of Excellence(TM) needed to fill an awkward leg in a Saturday paper, that was the copy they grabbed. It's not like anyone is back in the home newsroom reading down and signing off on proofs any more and the headline didn't originate from a local desk because they don't write heds any more. It's not even the worst mistake I've seen from our pagination geniuses this week.

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  3. if we posted all of the errors from the "centres of excellence" there would be little space for anything else. We hear about errors so often we stop responding to the complaints, no time, no one to actually call anyone back, those left behind are sitting at their desks shell-shocked.

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  4. did anyone hear about a truck of papers burning near London? Good thing there is a press close by to reprint the run. Bet the call centre was busy with that one!

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  5. At the end of the day - and I'm not defending pagination centres (they suck) - an editor still should be approving these pages.
    If it's a local page, we see the final version.
    I'm assuming that's the case in Sudbury.

    Tired editor? Maybe
    Pagination centre responsible? Not if an editor checked the page.

    Again, I am not defending the pagination centre concept. But it's too easy to blame them every time something gets screwed up.

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  6. We complain and complain about the errors but nobody seems to care, even the people supposedly overseeing them. From the top down, it's one big mistake.

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  7. Oh look, another correction to run for Friday's paper after a major blunder in the National half page PDF when they mixed up the attribution comments in their design.

    And the errors keep on growing.

    This company got rid of experienced editors and replaced them with the Centre of Excellence employees so one would assume they are far superior staff and thus their pages would be flawless

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  8. Just running a story about recycling pickup in Timmins in a Sudbury paper is already bad enough. Would there be anyone in Sudbury who would care about that?

    I remember when I worked in Timmins, it was always a struggle to fill the Northern Ontario page, because the Sudbury Star would never post anything but its editorials on the old content sharing site, and North Bay wasn't much better.I wonder if things have changed much now that CP is gone.

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