Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

I thought I was going to quit doing the Monterey Herald Boo-Boo Watch. The paper's gaffes were becoming fairly infrequent compared to last year (but still excessive when compared to previous years), and I was getting tired of scanning every stupid mistake. But in the last month I've seen an increase in Boo-Boos once again. Still, I tried to overlook the caption that identified two people in a photo that showed only one, the incoherent sentences with missing words, another confusing photo caption, etc. But today I decided to crank up the Boo-Boo Watch when the Monterey Herald printed the weather map for the San Francisco Bay Area instead of Monterey Bay.  

Last night I was was watching KYMB, the local MeTV outlet, when I saw a commercial for the Monterey Herald. It started out saying that it was time to start reading the newspaper again, and to encourage you to subscribe they offered a free trial. Sort of. "Try for a free week" the announcer said, three times. Not "Try it free for a week," or "Try it for a week, free." Nope, you can call the number and try for a free week. You may get it, you may not, but you can certainly try! This isn't the first time the Herald has employed atrocious grammar to sell its own product. Early last October the Herald ran a print ad promoting a new advertising partnership with Google. In big letters it said "Are customers find YOU or your COMPETITOR?" It ran for almost a week and never was corrected.   The Herald has become its own worst enemy. After all, a newspaper depends on words to communicate the daily news. If they don't use them properly in thei...

I'll give the Herald credit for making fewer boo-boos compared to this time last year, but careless errors are still more frequent than when our local daily still had a local editor. On Monday, May 11th, the Herald had a front page story about efforts to stabilize the finances of Museum of Monterey . The article contained this bizarre statement attributed to a Pacific Grove filmmaker named Bob Pacelli: "Pacelli, who’s known about the museum struggles for decades, describes the museum as an incredible asset that never recovered from the ill-will that developed after the city built the tunnel to divert traffic to the aquarium." This statement is wrong in so many ways! For starters, the tunnel was built in 1967, at least a decade before the aquarium was even a concept, and about 17 years before the aquarium first opened. The aquarium is not the reason for the tunnel's existence. The tunnel also predates the Stanton Center, which houses the museum, by a good quarter ...

There was a lunar eclipse very early this morning. Today's Herald says it's not going to happen until tonight. In fact, the eclipse was near totality right about the time the paper was landing on subscribers' front porches. Click image to enlarge I think I know how Herald staff got confused. The article states the eclipse would be seen on Saturday night in Australia, which every 5th grader knows is a day ahead of us in the time zone order. Herald editor, time to say "My name is Don Miller, I am the editor of two Monterey Bay area newspapers, but I am not smarter than a 5th grader." What a difference a day makes.

Monterey Downs, the controversial horse race track, hotel, and other assorted components proposed for an undisturbed portion of Fort Ord land, was a hot item at last Thursday's Seaside council meeting. I did not attend in person, but I did watch much of it on TV. The question of the day was whether the city should extend an exclusive negotiation agreement with the developer, Brian Boudreau, for another year or give up on it now. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't a major turning point or an earth shattering decision, but it drew an enormous crowd anyway. After two and a half hours of public testimony with a majority opposing the project, the council voted 4-1 to approve the extension. No surprise there. With the exception of Jason Campbell, Seaside city council members have been known to drool excitedly over the prospect of any new development in Seaside, and something on this scale is beyond anything dreamed of before Boudreau came along. In short, t...

Boo-boos in the Herald's print edition seem to be dwindling somewhat, but they're now appearing on the paper's website with some regularity. I first noticed this a few weeks ago when an individual posted a comment on the Herald's website saying he posted a comment under one article that showed up under an unrelated article. A day or two later the same thing happened to me. Then a few days ago, I clicked a link to an article and was taken to the wrong article. Back-button, try again, same result. And sometime last week Tom Karwin's weekly gardening column showed up on the Opinion web page. A mere fluke, perhaps? Nope, Barbara Quinn's nutrition column, which normally runs in Wednesday's food section, showed up on Monday's Opinion web page, with Jim Tunney's weekly sports column right below it. It's been bad enough that Digital First Media has made so many careless errors in the print edition, but now it appears they can't even get th...

I had hoped we'd get through the holidays without any more boo-boos, but the Herald gave us one for Christmas. The paper printed the same article twice, once on page 1 and again on page 3. The headlines were different, and the one which began on page 1 and finished on page 5 had three more paragraphs than the one on page 3, but the main text was otherwise identical.  

Monday's Herald had just one small boo-boo. The opening paragraph of a front page article was printed in two different fonts.

Honestly, is Herald management even aware that their guy covering Carmel doesn't know the territory? It has become painfully obvious that reporter Tom Leyde has never spent any significant time learning about the town, beyond what he's spoon-fed at city council meetings. I have documented numerous careless errors on his part, most recently in my November 7th Mental Note . Today, in an article about the town's experiment with parking meters Leyde magically relocated the north Sunset Center parking lot from the corner of Mission and 8th to "Junipero Street between Third and Fifth avenues." That is more or less the location of the Vista Lobos parking lot (on 3rd between Junipero and Torres) which he didn't place anywhere. At least he finally figured out that Carmel's numbered streets are "avenues" and not "streets." ________________ Elsewhere in today's Herald the weekly "Bits 'N' Bytes" column was publi...

Herald Boo-Boos are piling up on my desk. Time to clean it off . I am unable to reproduce an image of boo-boo #32 because it was just a teensy bit too large to fit on my scanner. So you'll have to be content with a written description. There was an editorial on Sunday November 16th entitled China climate change pact changes debate . It was under the heading "The Herald's View" which I found peculiar because I wouldn't expect our puny, semi-local Herald editorial board to tackle such a significant international topic. And I was right, for at the end it was signed "Bay Area News Group" indicating that it originated with a San Francisco Bay Area newspaper, and not the Herald. Typically editorials written elsewhere are listed under the heading "Other Views" so their origins are clear. __________ Number 33 was on page B-1 of that same day . It had an interesting story about the grave of a dog located at Carmel's Forest Theater. It i...

Just when I thought the Herald was starting to clean up its act and put the Boo-Boo Watch out of business two more careless errors dropped onto our front porch Tuesday morn. Boo-Boo #30 came in the form of a strange headline indicating that a new Senate chairman was planning a border. That's funny. I thought our country already had borders. Based on the content of the article, the headline would have made perfect sense if the word "bill" was tacked on the end, but it wasn't so it didn't. Incomplete sentences seemed to be the theme of the day. In a guest commentary the writer identified himself in his opening sentence as representing "The Planning and Conservation League." But in the little biographical blurb at the end Harold identified him as a member of "the Planning and Conservation." I guess the new space-saving policy at the Herald is just to lop off words when you run out of room. The remaining words still mean the same thin...

The good news today is that Herald boo-boos seem to be coming less frequently, but this week we had two. A couple of months ago a new reporter named Tom Leyde started covering Carmel news. In reading his stories I get the impression that the man has never spent much time in Carmel, and he doesn't seem to know his way around. Worse, he has written reports containing significant factual errors. I discussed two of these in detail in part 13 and part 14 of the Herald Boo-Boo Watch. Since then I was beginning to think that maybe he was starting to get the lay of the land. His reports on the happenings at city hall were in accord with reports from other sources. However, Leyde's reports were limited to city council activities. They did not require a broader knowledge of the town layout and features, and unfortunately his ignorance of the territory became glaringly evident again this week. In Tuesday's paper dated November 4th Leyde wrote about the council's decision ...

We've gone ten days without finding any significant boo-boos in the Herald. I guess that's a sign of progress. But we're back today because the Herald printed the same article two days in a row. It was a Q&A piece about Apple Pay. The one printed yesterday had two more Q&As than the one printed today, but otherwise they were identical.

The Herald's "Sounding off" feature seems more prone to careless errors than any other part of the newspaper. On Saturday October 11 they once again left off the names of the people who wrote the comments, printing nothing more than single quotation marks in their place. Honestly, is anybody proofreading anymore?  

Three days, three boo-boos. Wednesday October 1st a Herald editorial meant to endorse Dave Jones for Insurance Commissioner ended by recommending a vote for his opponent Ted Gaines. In a rare move, the Herald acknowledged this boo-boo and reprinted the endorsement the following day with the correct final sentence. ___________________________ Thursday October 2nd had an article on the front page with a mid-sentence font change. _________________________ Friday October 3rd an ad on page A9 announcing a joint Herald/Google advertising program employed atrocious grammar. I'm thinking it was written by one of those employees in India, where the Herald has outsourced its advertising work (yes, really ). Addendum 10/12/14: This ad actually ran for five or six consecutive days and never was corrected. As I noted in previous Mental Notes, careless errors such as these have been appearing with alarming regularity since Digital First Media moved Herald productio...

Part 20 of the Herald Boo-Boo Watch occurred last weekend. They say history repeats itself and in the Herald three historical events repeated themselves the following day! _____________________________ Part 21 from the September 27th issue indicates an over reliance on spell check and not enough checking by the human eye, adding to my suspicions that the production staff is spread way too thin. I'm pretty sure the title of this letter should say "pursue" and not "purse." _____________________________ And part 22 is another in the continuing series of improperly formatting the "Sounding Off" feature. Looks like they left off a word at the end. This one was from today's paper of September 28th.

I'm almost a week late posting this boo-boo from last Thursday's Herald. On the front page of the September 11th sports section they wrapped text around a blank space. I think the space was meant to hold the writer's name and photo. The good news is I haven't seen any Herald boo-boos in the last six days.

I thought I was going to make it all the way through Sunday's Herald without finding any boo-boos. But page D1 let me down. Under the Your Town news briefs was a notice about impending road work at two locations near Salinas. The notice in and of itself was fine, except that Harold put it under the "Monterey Peninsula" subheading. Harold, perhaps it's time to invest in a map.

Two new Boo-Boos came off the presses this week. Number 16 was a line in a September 3rd editorial praising the recently concluded Monterey County Fair. "The theme of 'Party With The Animals' evoked memories of the Central Coast's rural past,...." Whoever wrote that needs to get out of town more often. The vast majority of the Central Coast is still farms and ranches to this very day! And for Boo-Boo number 17, another formatting error was found on the September 5th editorial page. Once again the "Sounding Off" feature was missing the credit line identifying the writer. (I posted an example of a correctly formatted Sounding Off comment in Boo-Boo Watch part 4. )

We begin September with a pop quiz for Harold. What is the name of the organization that hosted the sailboat races in Monterey this weekend? A) The Monterey Peninsula Yacht Club (as stated in the Herald's page 1 photo caption). B) The Monterey Bay Yacht Club (as stated in the subheading introducing the page 1 article). C) The Monterey Yacht Club (as stated in the article, when it finally gets mentioned near the end). The correct answer is A. There is no such thing as the Monterey Bay Yacht Club or the Monterey Yacht Club. Oh Harold, it's sad to see a once great local newspaper become so incompetent so quickly.