BBC makes ‘its’ error

Oops. I guess not even the all-powerful BBC is immune to errors of “its” versus “it’s”. While the former is possessive (its car), the latter is a contraction of “it is”.

PC Magazine joins words

Reporting on Apple and Microsoft, PC Magazine made a mistake in which the phrase, “It may” became “Imay.”

PC World misspells a contraction

PC World reported on a new service by Google called Buzz and misspelled “hasn’t” by leaving out the “n”.

Note: We are experimenting with quotation marks, as part of an ongoing study to examine their interaction with other punctuation marks. The quotation marks around the letter “n” above would be incorrect in American English but correct in British English. We currently believe that the British version is a better rule. There is no reason to include the period in the quotation in this instance, as it confers to additional information to the quotation and may, in fact, confuse a reader into thinking that the period is part of the omission.

FOX has trouble with font sizes

While traditionally outside the scope of our primary interests, we think it’s reasonable to mention when news organizations, blogs, or FOXNews.com makes other typographical errors. FOXNews.com recently reported on the First Couple and had several different typeface sizes for different sentences, even within the same sentence. It was unclear if it was intended to add emphasis. Major WebKit-based (Apple Safari, Google Chrome) and Gecko-based (Firefox, Camino) browsers both showed these formatting issues.

AppleInsider cites wrong number

AppleInsider reported on next-generation Intel chips in future Apple computer hardware. In the article, they meant to refer to the 32 nm fabrication process and not a 3 nm process.

With respect to units on numbers, this site prefers a space separating the number and the unit of measure, such as “32 nm.” AI and many others choose to omit this space.

While AppleInsider is not even a Top 5,000 site on the Internet, according to Alexa.com, it enjoys a 2,000-level spot within the United States. In truth they amount more to a blog than they do an actual news organization, but the quality of their content is among the best in that class of information.

CNN forgets period

CNN reported on the Special Senate Election in Massachusetts. In the article, they forgot a period at the end of a sentence.

NY Daily News forgets a space

The NY Daily News reported on Hobey Baker Award winner and rookie Rangers defenseman Matt Gilroy’s ridiculous demotion and left out a space in the phrase “22 skaters.” Gilroy recently completed his senior season at Boston University, where he led the team to win every possible piece of hardware a college hockey team could imagine.

Miami Herald misspells ‘phenomenon’

The Miami Herald recently reported on the blue moon occurring tonight (which I probably won’t see through our snowstorm). They misspelled the word “phenomenon.”

Vancouver Sun does not complete sentence

The Vancouver Sun, reporting on the tragic loss of a Canadian reporter who was covering the war in Afghanistan, did not complete a sentence caption that it was writing.

While this blog is nothing more than a dumb copy errors blog, we are sorry for the loss of all those whose lives have been taken in wars, including this reporter Michelle Lang and the four Canadian soldiers who died alongside her.

ABC News misspells ‘al Qaeda’

ABC News misspelled ‘al Qaeda’ in a headline today that slipped into their RSS feed and was aggregated by Google News.