USCHO on the Beanpot Final

[Beeeej]

USCHO's recap of the BU/NE final:

http://www.uscho.com/recaps/20042005/m/02/14/nu-bu.php

Did I miss something, or are there now five teams in the Beanpot?  If not, how is it Northeastern was "[p]laying against four ranked teams"?!

Beeeej

[billhoward]

USCHO is about enthusiasm for college hockey first, absolute accuracy and fluid prose second. Plus, the guy was writing on deadline (by definition). I don't think there's a long line of copy editors in green eyeshades this story passes through en route to a posting.

It's an order of magnitude better than a decade ago when your college hockey fix was the weekly column in the Boston Globe or NY Times.

[Beeeej]

I'm not asking for "absolute accuracy," Bill, I'm asking for fewer idiots.

Beeeej

[Will]

Not to mention that Northeastern would never have actually played three teams (let alone four) at all in the Beanpot, given that it is a two-round tournament.

[billhoward]

Easy, big fella. Not only do journalists enlighten and amuse us, but they serve a valuable public service, namely keeping politicians, lawyers, and car salesmen from being lonely at the very bottom of the "professions you trust" polls.

Plus, if Jason Moy is really typing that 2,000 word bracketology column from scratch each week, rather than cutting and pasting the 1,500-world boilerplate preface before letting loose with the week's changes and musings, the kinetic energy from his fingers moving up and down across the keyboard might heat a village the size of Ogdensburg.

And as you know, every village has its idiot. Many of them choose publishing which keeps them out of, say, teaching, where they could do real damage.

[Will]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

 the 1,500-world boilerplate preface  [/q]

That must be some boilerplate. :-D

2000 words isn't too hard to pull off, if you know what you're talking about.  In a double-spaced Word document, that's at most 8 pages.  That's one night of work, easily accomplished while working a normal ~40 hour/week job.  Obviously, it's even easier if most of it is copied and pasted.

[billhoward]

I was making fun of the column's pyramid - not inverted pyramid - style. (Inverted pyramid meaning the important stuff in the first graf, eg "A crazed gunman wearing a black and red jersey shot and wounded four Boston Terrier mascot dogs outside Agganis Arena Monday night" and the last paragraph describing Boston laws on cruelty to animals.) As you have seen in Bracketology, you have to wade through the seeding rules each and every week until you get to the writer's thoughts on who might be paired where against whom. That boilerplate should all be on the bottom or better off on the side.

In newspapers, they keep around former useful newsmen, now drunks and divorced, as copy editors, and even in their stupors they recognize egregious errors of writing and fix it. That alas does not exist in the world on online journalism where the staffing is lean.

[Beeeej]

Do you mean to suggest, Bill, that USCHO doesn't have people who edit the game reports and columns before they go online?  Because I seriously doubt that's remotely true.  They may even be drunk and/or divorced.

Beeeej

[adamw]

Jeez - settle down Beeej ... yes, our editors are actually drunk and divorced ... but christ, I can look through every day's Washington Post and find 30 little errors.  It happens.  Do you actually think the people writing and editing believe there are 4 other ranked teams - or that it was a typo that was glossed over under pressure? This makes the writer and/or editor an idiot?  Do you have any idea how much editing is done each week -- often editing work from student writers with varying degree of skill -- by one or two people?  Last night, one editor had to deal with 6 lengthy stories and update the front page.  Manpower is an issue - but the ability to the job, and desire to be accurate is not.

[adamw]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

USCHO is about enthusiasm for college hockey first, absolute accuracy and fluid prose second.[/q]

I realize you weren't really criticizing - but that, I can attest, is false.

[Josh '99]

[Q]adamw Wrote:
Last night, one editor had to deal with 6 lengthy stories and update the front page.  Manpower is an issue - but the ability to the job, and desire to be accurate is not.[/q]Clearly, the solution is to not carry an unnecessarily large number of articles about the Beanpot.  :-P

[billhoward]

How much editing a deadline-driven story gets before going online, that would be a question perhaps put to someone from USCHO, and even there you may get a politic rather than frank air-the-linens-in-public answer. (You want someone to say, "We try, but we're thinly staffed and thinly funded, and stuff happens"?)

Regardless, deadline pressures affect everyone, not just USCHO.com, and my general experience with online vs. print stories I write is that the editing / factchecking / verification process for a deadline-driven online story is less. Also, it's less in newer organizations that don't have as much staffing. That also holds for print pubs that are new vs. established publications. You'll see an occasional typo in Business Week or Fortune and you're aghast because you almost never see it. New Yorker is the gold standard for fact-checking; if the author mentions red-flocked wallpaper in the bar of a restaurant in Venice, a fact-checker contacts the restaurant to confirm. (Note that fact-checking is not the same as opinion-checking, because you can't do that. The facts could be all right and the opinion could be wrong, if opinions can be wrong.)

Online has the advantage of your being able to correct an error if you choose to. Running a Corrections & Clarifications note two weeks later isn't the same. No reason USCHO couldn't change Northeastern being in a tournament with "four" ranked teams to facing "three" in the Beanpot. As you saw, The Sun changed online "fascist" to "fastest" or whatever word it was the author meant but didn't type out.

You've seen how the online community can shape events, ranging from getting corrections made to affecting lives and careers. Bloggers helped blow away a CNN executive, Eason Jordan, for comments he made in Davos at the economic summitt (claiming that American troops deliberately fired at journalists). The online community keeps writers and editors on their toes.

[adamw]

Bill - you have a wonderful tendency to write a lot without saying anything  Is there anything you just said that anyone would disagree with?

There's a difference between fact-checking and opinion-checking ... there's also a difference between stupid and typos.

[KeithK]

[q]The facts could be all right and the opinion could be wrong, if opinions can be wrong.[/q]Of course, opinions can be wrong.  You're opinions are wrong all the time.  Wait, that's just my opinion!  And it's probably wrong too!  :-D   (jk, btw)

[DisplacedCornellian]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

And as you know, every village has its idiot. [/q]

So what village are you missing from?

(sorry, so easy that I couldn't resist...)