Mitch Albom did it. A Boston Globe freelancer did it. Now the Orlando Sentinel has joined the party by going to print with details about an event that hadn't yet occurred, and then getting busted when things didn't happen as expected. Here's the correction:
An article on the front of Tuesday's Sports section reported incorrectly that a meeting occurred Monday night between Orlando Magic General Manager John Weisbrod and interim coach Chris Jent about the team's search for a new coach. In fact, the meeting did not occur until Tuesday morning. The reporter wrote the article after being told by Jent that the meeting would occur Monday evening but failed to check back to determine that the meeting had happened. In fact, the meeting had been postponed because of a scheduling conflict.
Now let's be clear: reporters will regularly write stories so the information is current/relative for the day it is published. The problem happens when they don't insert words to hedge their bets when events have not yet occurred. In this case, the writer should have said that the meeting was expected to happen Monday night, just as Albom should have written about the plans of those two basketball fans, rather then opting for the more dramatic present tense. These seem like small mistakes, but when you are wrong -- and these three recent examples show that plans can change and reporters will often be wrong -- it turns the story into all-out fiction.
