Last Friday, we blogged on here about a story in Newsday on the current state of long-running comic strips. The article set some sort of world record for errors per square inch. In almost all cases, the folks they identified as currently writing and drawing certain strips are not only not working on them, in some cases because they're dead.
As you may recall, I phoned the reporter that day and told him what he'd done. It's taken until this morning for Newsday to acknowledge any errors. Here is what they ran, in toto…
The current artist for the comic strip "Blondie" is John Marshall. Craig Boldman and Henry Scarpelli are the artists now for "Archie," and "Mary Worth" is drawn by Joe Giella and written by Karen Moy. June Brigman is the current artist of "Brenda Starr," working with writer Mary Schmich. For "The Phantom," Paul Ryan is the current artist and Tony DePaul is the current writer. The credits were given incorrectly in an Act Two story Saturday.
Actually, no. The credits were given incorrectly in a story that ran on Thursday, not Saturday. And the above list doesn't address all the mistakes in the piece. Nothing in it, for example, amends the erroneous statement that Alex Raymond once assisted on the Blondie strip. Moreover, the original piece says that Dan DeCarlo, Bill Ziegler, John Saunders and Stan Drake are all producing certain features when, in fact, those gentlemen are all deceased. Saying that someone else is doing those jobs would leave a reader with the impression that all four of those gents are still around and just aren't doing those jobs at present.
An incomplete correction, of course, only matters if someone reads both the original article and the correction, which is unlikely unless it's through my links. Newsday puts theirs in a "corrections" section that few readers probably ever see. I had trouble finding it on the website and I was looking for it specifically because I already knew the article was flawed and had complained. I have no idea where the correction is in the printed paper, if it's even in the printed paper. But I'll bet you it isn't prominent.
Many newspapers, when they correct an article that's available online, will post the correction on the same page. Newsday doesn't. At this moment, if you go to the page with the original piece on it, it's just as wrong as it ever was. There are some comments that readers have posted but the link is hard to spot, and those criticisms are only there because outsiders took the time to post them. Newsday hasn't corrected that page.
This may all sound trivial but ever since I got involved in comic books and strips, I've watched a steady stream of newspaper and magazine articles that just plain got things wrong. It's mind-boggling to me how many mistakes there are in such pieces. A few, I can understand. I've made some doozies in my own writing but the volume in some articles is staggering, especially given the easy availability of on-the-record sources. Even worse, of course, is when there is little or no willingness in some news organizations to issue corrections and it's all done a lot to shake my faith in journalism of all kinds and topics.
The guy who wrote that Newsday essay was not a moist-behind-the-ears intern. He is, amazingly, an editor and staff writer at the paper who is on the verge of retirement after forty years there…but he didn't take the ten seconds to Google "Blondie" and find out who currently does the strip. Is the person writing about Iraq for that paper adhering to the same standard?