Tighter than tight deadlines were in place for Thomas Boswell’s account of World Series Game 4, leaving little time to correct, uh, the sort of typos that appear in almost every one of my CSTB entries, regardless of the time of day. The Washington Post’s resident ombudsman, Alexander Andrews, while acknowledging the tough circumstances, lowers the boom on Boswell (above) just the same.
Those who read Boswell in Monday morning™s newspaper encountered a mess. By my count, the column contained at least 20 typos, grammatical errors or misspellings.
œI™d like my 75 cents back, please, wrote reader Mitch Zeller of Olney, who had purchased a copy of Monday™s Post at the Bethesda Metro station. œThere is no excuse for such a shoddy product. It™s completely unprofessional; more errors than one would see in a high school or college newspaper.
Sunday™s thrilling Game 4 in Philadelphia ended shortly before midnight, and Boswell filed his story at 12:07 a.m. Crafted literally as the game was unfolding in the exciting late innings, the story came in rough. And it was longer than the allotted space, leaving editors to try to edit and significantly trim it within about 20 minutes while they also edited and packaged other World Series stories and stats. Editors hit the button on Boswell™s column at 12:25 a.m., just shy of the 12:30 a.m. final copy deadline. They knew it had received only cursory editing, but the alternative was to hold it out of the paper. That would have angered readers who have come to rely on Boswell™s keen insights.
The result were passages like these:
– Extra rest for a pitcher œmay be on crucial value instead of œmay be of crucial value.
– œ…the Yankees had reverse the tide instead of œreversed the tide.
– œ…tactics that may bare on the rest of the sears instead of œbear on the rest of the series.