Boing Boing’s entire article:
“This inquisitive fellow was unable to keep his hands off a delicate museum piece hanging from the wall at the National Watch & Clock Museum. After breaking it, he lost interest and walked away, leaving his companion to clean up the mess.”
Description on the video, posted directly by the museum itself:
“This is why we beg and plead with our visitors to please refrain from touching objects in museums. The couple did notify Museum staff immediately.”
A few points:
- So in fact, after breaking it, the guy didn’t “lose interest and walk away”, but actually went to notify museum staff. Which means Boing Boing managed to get the story entirely wrong.
- Getting the story entirely wrong is especially impressive when it consists of just two sentences and an embedded video.
- From this, I think we can safely say: not even bothering to read the description attached to a video when you intend to write something about it is not recommended practice.
- The incorrect information has been pointed out in the site’s comments, but the article has not been corrected or updated to reflect this.
- Oh, and the article is a duplicate of one posted on the site two and a half weeks before. Except that the original piece got the details correct.
Still, aside from that, excellent work Boing Boing.
Oh, and did I mention that the writer of the piece works as a Research Director?
2 comments
Jamie on 3 July 2016 @ 7pm
Boing Boing is a collaborative blog, so the people involved are of differing talents, from Cory who is damn near perfect, via the brittle Xeni to the useless co-founder Mark. So they do multiple-post a lot, and there’s such a variation in quality that you never know what you’re going to get.
This, of course, is the mark of a paper fanzine/alternative newspaper, which is what Boing Boing originally was.
The problem is, that model doesn’t work on the social web, with comments and sharing and the ability to critique, but they’ve never moved on to that newer model. The old model isn’t broken, per se, just very old fashioned, so I doubt they feel the need to. Of course, this means when they fail, they fail hard, and publicly, and with ill-grace, at their own choice.
But there but for the grace of god go all of us that run webzines of any sort.
John Hoare on 3 July 2016 @ 11pm
Yes indeed. This is a particularly awful example – not in terms of importance, just purely in terms of “I can’t even be bothered to read the description of the video I’m embedding” – but I certainly don’t mean to indicate I never make any mistakes ever.
I think my favourite thing I’ve ever done is write an article pointing out someone had spelt “miniatures” wrong, and then spelling it wrong myself. That well deserved someone writing an article pointing out I’m a dumb cunt.
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