A story in the national section of today's New York Times runs under the headline "San Francisco Paper Struggles With the Printed Word." The article mocks the San Francisco Examiner for having developed "such a reputation for missteps that it has become sport in the city's cafes, not to mention San Francisco's other newspapers, to pick up The Examiner and play spot the mistakes."
Hello? The same can be said of the New York Times, which is developing quite a reputation for missteps of its own. The Times article mocks the Examiner for misspelling the name of the Examiner's own managing editor, but the Times recently ran a correction for having misspelled the name of its own owning family, the Sulzbergers.
The Times also criticizes the Examiner for "an odd choice of front-page stories," giving as the sole example an article reprinted from the Baltimore Sun about whether dodge ball should be banned from schools in Cecil County, Md. The truth is, the dodge ball story was a fabulous scoop with all sorts of resonance for those concerned about youths going soft in an age of overprotection and excessive emphasis on manufactured self-esteem. The Sun article played this for all it was worth, noting that "dodge-ball policy debates abound nationwide," quoting the director of the "National Amateur Dodge Ball Association" and archly quoting the language of the proposed ban on physical education activities "requiring human targets." The Sun's dodge-ball story, it just so happens, was written by a reporter that the New York Times itself tried unsuccessfully to hire last year.
The New York Times mocks the Examiner for its "misspellings," but the Times itself is rife with misspellings, as the Times' own executive editor told his colleagues in a speech at a retreat earlier this year, and as Smartertimes.com frequently points out. And the Examiner has a much smaller budget and fewer editors than the New York Times does.