The error-prone business reporters at the New York Times

The Radar web site has an interesting story where it ranks the worst reporters at the New York Times. The rankings are primarily based on the number of corrections divided by the total number of bylines the reporter has had.

Rikolas Deagitle wrote, “Radar spent three months slogging through the New York Times‘s archives from June 2005 to March 2007. We calculated the correction rate by first narrowing the field of stories to those with single bylines. Then we divided the number of screw-ups attributable solely to reporter error (those due to editing or in headlines, photo captions, or credits were excluded) by the number of stories written by that reporter within the timeframe.”

And the results showed that two of the top 10 — or maybe it’s the bottom 10 — have worked on the business desk.

4. Katharine Q. Seelye (9.3 percent correction rate)
Seelye, who recently moved from the newspaper business beat to become an online political writer, is often tripping over herself. When Knight-Ridder put the Philadelphia Inquirer (where Seelye once worked) and Daily News up for sale last year, she wrote that the papers were expected to fetch $600,000, a significant savings over the $600 million asking price. In another slip-up, she said that the former owner of the Dallas Times Herald had let the paper “die” when he sold it long before it went out of business. Seelye also reported that the New Orleans Times-Picayune suspended publication for three days after Katrina when, in fact, the paper had famously continued publishing online. But we saved the best for last: Seelye, who covered Clinton in 1992, Dole in 1996, and Gore in 2000, once managed to misspell the family name of the New York Times’s owners: It’s Ochs-Sulzberger (with an e). Now that’s an awkward elevator ride.

10. Damon Darlin (9.5 percent correction rate)
Darlin, a business reporter, didn’t make what you might call serious errors. But he did make a good number of them. He calculated, for example, that you’d need to save about $1,000 per month with 7 percent monthly returns to get $500,000 in 18 years for your kid’s college education. More like $1,200 with 7 percent annualized returns, idiot! In an even more egregious display of very minor mistakery, he mixed up William R. Hewlett and David Packard’s roles in starting Silicon Valley and botched a description of the pioneers who invented integrated circuits. Darlin made five errors in an article about McClatchy’s sale of The San Jose Mercury News, the whopper of which was a claim that Silicon Valley’s tech jobs were up to pre-bubble-burst levels when, in fact, the region had only regained about 10,000 of the 178,000 jobs it lost after the dot-com bust in the late 90s. And last September, when the HP news-leak investigation scandal hit, Darlin reported that a Timesman named John Markoff (sound familiar?) was a target of the company’s gumshoes. He wrote that a lawyer for AT&T disclosed that information; actually, it came from California’s attorney general’s office.

Read more here.