I was appalled when I read a mistake-filled Reuters article that was written by Gerry Shih and Alexei Oreskovic, and edited by Jonathan Weber and Ken Wills. That’s at least four sets of eyes on this article on Twitter, yet we still have these errors:
The company is now on the verge of fulfilling the opportunity Costolo foresaw as it prepares for the most highly anticipated initial public offering since Facebook’s debut last May. The offering is expected to value Twitter at up to $15 billion and make its early investors, including Costolo, very wealthy indeed.
Actually, Facebook’s IPO was May 2012, but the sentence made it sound like May 2013.
Costolo was a comparative late-comer at Twitter, joining the company three years after it’s 2006 launch, but the company increasingly bears his imprint as it hurtles towards the IPO: deliberate in decision-making but aggressive in execution, savvy in its public relations and yet laser-focused on financial results.
Seriously? These professional writers still can’t figure out the difference between “it’s” and “its.”
“The founders consider Dick a co-founder, that’s how deep the connection is,” said Bijan Sabet, an investor at Spark Capital and a Twitter board member from 2008 to 2011. “He’s not this hired gun to run the company. He understands building out the business but also the product, strategy, vision.”
Here, the authors separated two independent clauses with only a comma. Since the sentence is a quotation, preventing them from adding an “and” after the comma, they should have used a semicolon.
I did find more errors, but I think you get the point. This terrible article illustrates one reason why professional journalism gets such a bad rap.
The NFL is really an oddity in a business sense. The primary example of this is that it’s exempt from antitrust laws, otherwise it couldn’t control the amateur draft, salary cap, free agency restrictions and TV rights the way it currently does (by colluding).