At the risk of my eyeglasses taking on a rose-colored hue not previously mandated by the optometrist, wasn’t there a time when “media” (a loaded term, indeed) incorporated into its daily mission some semblance of commitment to getting basic information right?
I don’t mean to imply matters like editorial judgments, with which we all can merrily debate, but just basic facts: Times, dates, addresses and the like. These are the sort of elementary listings that should be easiest to get right, and when they aren't, we see corrections all of the time, whether in print or electronically.
The electronic media probably performs no worse in terms of accuracy than old-school print, given the latter's salacious and scurrilous salad days, but every now and then, it's useful to be reminded of why the Internetz cannot always be trusted. As evidence of the lamentably scattershot world we currently inhabit, indulge me while I tell a story.
It all began with a
posting by Alexis Messmer at Louisville.com on March 27, in which the city of New Albany was highly praised. So far, so good, in a buffed 'n' polished, chamber of commerce sort of way, except that amid the boosterism, the brief description of my business interests was badly skewed, and required correction.
I sent a request for these corrections to Louisville.com by way of its website reply form, and heard nothing back. A few days later, on Twitter (April 3), I managed to get through with a message to the editor, Elizabeth Myers, and explained the problems with NABC’s citation in the original story, which began with the heading itself: “New Albanian Brew Company Pizzeria.”
First, it is inaccurate. The name of the company is New Albanian Brewing Company, not "Brew," and the full name of the location in question is Pizzeria & Public House, which a cursory visit to our
web site will confirm.
What's more, the inaccurate heading doubled as a hyperlink, errantly leading not to the pizzeria’s section of the company website, but to the Bank Street Brewhouse listing therein. Here is the text of Messmer's original
posting.
New Albanian Brew Company Pizzeria: The New Albanian offers bistro cuisines that are accompanied by their own house beers. You can check out what’s on tap on their website for the full list of beer choices. They offer drink specials throughout the week and Sunday brunch. Be prepared to call a cab, because drinking one beer won’t be enough. Don’t forget to try to the Hoosier Daddy, Crimson and Cream ale paired with pizza, bread sticks, and beer cheese. YUM!
I offered other necessary corrections beyond the heading/hyperlink error, because as those familiar with NABC can see quite easily, the author had mixed various elements from two distinct locations into one misleading mishmash.
NABC has two on-premise locations, and we sell our beer to other
establishments through the normal distribution channels.
NABC Pizzeria & Public House
3312 Plaza Drive (off Grant Line Road)
NABC Bank Street Brewhouse
415 Bank Street (downtown)
After the incorrect (and broken) link, she mentions bistro cuisine … which is served at Bank Street Brewhouse, not the incorrectly named and linked “New Albanian Brew Company Pizzeria.” She is correct that beers are listed at the website, but the link is wrong. Did she even go to the web site?
Drink specials are the same at both locations. She mentions brunch, which is only at BSB, not the Pizzeria location. Finally, after trying to link the Pizzeria to Bank Street, she talks about the pizza – which is at the Pizzeria, not Bank Street (where the link would have taken folks if not broken).
To the editor, I pointed to the mixed blessings inherent in the rapid sharing of fundamentally flawed and garbled information.
It’s nice for both of us (NABC and Louisville.com) that the piece is being forwarded and linked electronically, but this paragraph is so muddled that I’m not sure it helps us very much. In short, for someone reading this without prior knowledge, it's likely to convey the impression that we serve pizza at BSB.
Beyond that, and while conceding that I can be an ass of epic dimension, getting some basic facts arranged correctly strikes me as a prerequisite of someone purporting to contribute content to a web site like yours. I know; I'm old, and have old-fashioned expectations. The NABC web site is fairly clear about it; the two locations have separate pages, and the descriptions are accurate. But the URL has to be right for it all to matter.
Here is the editor’s reply, also on April 3:
It is not old-fashioned for a business owner to have high expectations regarding the information distributed about his or her business. The web makes it far more difficult to do so, but I certainly understand your predicament.
I have removed the offending paragraph, so the article now has no reference to your business. I will forward your email to the writer (who happens to be a college intern in our office) and hopefully she can re-add the paragraph and correctly note the information you have so kindly given.
Again, so sorry you've had a negative experience. We are working very hard on a site redesign, and we have had a few server outages in the past weeks, so perhaps that is why your contact did not go through. In general it is best to contact me by email this address.
Thank you for your contact, and I hope you have a wonderful day, please let me know if I can be of further service.
Thus, we were completely expunged from the article, and I began looking periodically to see if corrections had been made. Crickets chirped; pins dropped. No correction was forthcoming, and so I decided to check back on the morning of April 18.
Three weeks since the original piece ... two weeks since we exchanged thoughts ... and the net result, as it appears now, is that my being a business owner with high expectations translates into permanent removal from an article, merely because I pointed out not just one, but several errors.
Before I write about this experience on my blog, I'm just curious to know if this was the intended outcome from the start. Would it have been better for me to say nothing and tolerate the errors, because at least then the reference would remain?
I must say, all of this confuses me.
The reply came later on the 18th.
I am very sorry you've had a negative experience. In general, when an error on the site is pointed out to me I do my best to fix it right away. As I am personally unfamiliar with your business, I removed the paragraph entirely, to avoid the continued distribution of any misinformation.
Certainly it was not the preferred outcome for your business to be removed entirely from the article. The site is run mostly on contributions from freelance writers, and when a larger rewrite or edit is needed I contact the author of the article in question. I forwarded your email to the writer in this case, and it looks like she made the decision not to include your business in the article. I would guess that decision had to do with timing; as I'm sure you know, the site updates daily, and by the time you and I had our exchange, the article in question was completely "off the radar".
We do our best to make the site informative, fun to read and well written, and I am constantly working on the balance of content and quality. I appreciate your patience in dealing with us and pointing out our error; believe me, we love to know when we can fix a problem. I hope in the future one of our writers will cover your business in a more detailed and helpful way.
Have a great weekend
In short: As the person in charge, what do you expect out of me -- results? Let's try to absorb this stunning admission of editorial and administrative impotence.
An an entertainment news “source” deriving content from amateurs, free-lancers and interns. Louisville.com relies entirely on them to make corrections of their own mistakes, with cooperation purely optional, even when the corrections already have been provided free of charge, and although the editor, ostensibly better trained at some variety of “journalism” than these randomly selected contributors, cannot herself incorporate these proffered corrections, she can casually ask the contributors to do it if and when they wish – and anyway, after a certain amount of time, the whole shebang is dated, and no one, least of all the editor, cares any longer about what’s accurate and what is not … and golly, maybe next time one of our writers spins the coverage wheel, it will turn out better. Maybe.
It's just plain breathtaking, isn't it?
If NABC paid these people for advertising, I wonder if the listing would be corrected, or merely offered to the originator for improvement if the chance arose -- no hurry or anything, and by the way, can you please provide more content, accurate or otherwise?
It's "The Front Page" for modern times, I suppose. Is it any wonder I’m bitter about the state of the information nation?
