Regret the Error

Press release apology

From a press release issued by the Institute for Canadian Values:

"Earlier this afternoon, a statement was issued by the Institute for Canadian Values which included a quote by me that Ipsos-Reid had 'produced results that are simplistic (and) misleading' in reference to a recent poll on the subject of Canadians' attitudes toward 'right to die'," said Joseph Ben-Ami, Executive Director of the ICV. "I would like to clarify that this statement was not meant to impugn either the reputation or the professional integrity of Ipsos-Reid, which I and all Canadians know to be of the highest standard."
"Neither I, nor the Institute for Canadian Values, believe that Ipsos-Reid is guilty of intentionally or unintentionally misleading anyone, and we regret that our critique might have been mistakenly misinterpreted in that way."

UPDATED: Harvard math prof Dr. Shing-Tung Yau claims New Yorker story defamed him

Dr. Shing-Tung Yau, a famous mathematician who was unfavorably portrayed in a recent New Yorker article about the Poincaré conjecture, is alleging that Pulitzer-prize winner Sylvia Nasar defamed him. Strangely, however, his press release (below) doesn't mention the co-author of the piece, David Gruber. Dr. Yau's attorney has sent a letter to the magazine on behalf of his client. Dr. Yau "has demanded that The New Yorker and Nasar make a prominent correction of the errors in the article, and apologize for an insulting illustration that accompanied it. "
Dr. Yau will be holding a webcast on Wednesday to detail his allegations. We'll be there. In the meantime, read the press release is below.
UPDATE: The Boston Herald has a short article on Dr. Yau's charges. It also has a couple of quotes from New Yorker editor David Remnick:

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said yesterday he had only recently received Cooper’s letter, but the magazine “painstakingly checked the facts” in the Aug. 28 article “as we do with all pieces in The New Yorker.”
“I would have assumed that Professor Yau and his attorney would have waited for a full response to their letter before forwarding it to the press,” Remnick said.

The press release:

Pulitzer-prize winner Sylvia Nasar ("A Beautiful Mind") defamed world renowned Harvard mathematics professor Dr. Shing-Tung Yau, in an article about a noteworthy mathematical proof in The New Yorker magazine entitled "Manifold Destiny" (August 28, 2006), according to a letter written by Dr. Yau's attorney, Howard M. Cooper of Todd & Weld LLP of Boston. In the letter, Dr. Yau has demanded that The New Yorker and Nasar make a prominent correction of the errors in the article, and apologize for an insulting illustration that accompanied it.

"Beyond repairing the damage to my own reputation, we seek to minimize the damage done to the mathematics community itself, which is ludicrously portrayed as contentious rather than cooperative and more competitive than collegial," Dr. Yau said. "Mathematicians from the foremost institutions - from Beijing to Berkeley - have been appalled at the fictionalizing of our profession."

The attorney letter alleges that Ms. Nasar misrepresented her intentions in emails to him in which she claimed an interest in the "reuniting of physics and mathematics" and that she had been impressed with praise of his work from Stephen Hawking. Never during the three months in which she worked on the article, according to the letter, was Dr. Yau made aware of or asked to respond to charges leveled against him in the published article, claiming that Dr. Yau was trying to take credit for the solution of the Poincare Conjecture away from Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman. Contrary to the article, there has never been a 'battle' over credit for the solution, said the letter. Many of the other scholars interviewed by Ms. Nasar report being similarly deceived, according to the letter, with one professor at the University of Michigan comparing her work to that of the notorious fabricator, Jason Blair of The New York Times.

Shing-Tung Yau, a professor at Harvard since 1987, who himself received a Fields Medal in 1982, holds today the nation's highest science award, the National Medal of Science, awarded in 1997 for his "profound contributions to mathematics that have had a great impact on fields as diverse as topology, algebraic geometry, general relativity, and string theory. His work insightfully combines two different mathematical approaches and has resulted in the solution of several longstanding and important problems in mathematics."

The allegations made in the letter will be discussed in detail in a webcast open to all interested parties scheduled for Noon EDT, Wednesday, September 20, 2006. Log in information will be posted on http://www.doctoryau.com/ . The letter sent to The New Yorker is available at his website.

Correction to a story about a spellcheck company that made an error

...whew. This story from Reuters contained a typo in the second paragraph, though we don't know what it was. The correction only said, " Corrects typo in 2nd paragraph." Enjoy:

TORONTO (Reuters) - A company that sells software to correct irritating Internet spelling mistakes has reissued its latest news release to correct a minor snafu.
TextTrust, which says it focuses on "eliminating the negative text impressions on Web sites," re-released a Tuesday news release to correct a mistake that listed the most common spelling errors on "the 16 million we (sic) pages it has spell checked over the past year."
It said commonly misspelled words included independent, accommodation and definitely, which were spelled independant, accomodation and definately.
"It's very embarrassing," said Pat Brink, PR consultant for the Toronto-based company. "I made the mistake, not TextTrust -- they do a much better job, It's certainly egg on the face of this public relations person."
The release quoted TextTrust as saying that it used both human editors and special spell-checking software to scour Web sites for spelling mistakes. "TextTrust wants to make sure that organizations never again receive the 'I found a spelling error on your web site' e-mail," it said.

Will Ferrell is not dead, not paragliding

Earlier this morning, a press release was put on i-Newswire, a free online press release distribution service, claiming that Will Ferrell died in a paragliding accident yesterday. Here is the first sentence of the release:

"Los Angeles -- Actor Will Ferrell accidentally died in a freak para-gliding accident yesterday in Torey Pines, Southern California."

We'd love to show you more (see UPDATE below), but that's the only text available via Google News, which as of now still has it as the top news item if you type in "Will Ferrell." See our screenshot below. i-Newswire has since removed the release, and clicking on the story link on Google takes you to a page that says, "The content of this press release was removed or moved to another location. Please use our search function to search for the new location or enter a search string to find similar items." A search on Ferrell's name comes up empty on the i-Newswire site.
So was it a mistake? A hoax? Can we still hope for Bewitched 2 to some day make it into theaters? Yes, probably, and God help us all.
Thanks to the crack team at Hour, Montreal's alternative weekly, we have a definitive answer on the whereabouts and breathing status of Ferrell. (Disclosure: The editor of this site, Craig Silverman, writes a column for Hour.) As of about 4:10 p.m. EST today Will Ferrell was on set at a movie he is shooting in Montreal. This was reported by a source who was standing just a few feet away from the not-dead actor. Ferrell apparently has all of his limbs and was not wearing paragliding equipment. All signs point to him being alive. Which means this mysterious press release was full of hooey.
We have contacted i-Newswire to get a full version of the release, and to find out who sent it and why. We'll post any updates. UPDATE: Well, that was fast. We were sent the full text of the release by a couple of people, one of whom identified himself as "the creator" but didn't offer any more information. After another email exchange, it was revealed they were not "the creator" of the release. Just a helpful reader. We also noticed that Defamer has a post up about this. We're still hoping for a bit more background from the true creator and/or i-Newswire. In the meantime, here is the full text of the clearly fake and barely copy edited release:

Los Angeles -- Actor Will Ferrell accidentally died in a freak para-gliding accident yesterday in Torey Pines, Southern California. The accident apparently happened somewhere near the famed paragliding site after a freak wind gush basically blew Ferrell and his companion towards a wooded area where they lost control before crashing into the dense foilage.   
Ferrell and his professional guide, Horacio Gomez of Airtek Paragliding Center attempted the jump at around 2 in the afternoon. According to witnesses, the conditions were basically ideal for para-gliding and the weather did'nt pose a problem at all.
The jump started normally as Ferrell and Gomez glided carefully across the vast area and were seemed headed into the righ direction just before what witnesses said a freak wind somehow blew them off course, causing the paragliding professional Gomez to somehow lose control.
As horrified witnesses looked on, the duo headed straight for the dense woods near the jump off point and crashed at an estimated 60 mph hitting the trees as they hurtled to the ground.
Some friends of the actor who witnessed the accident immediately called up 911. The paramedics vainly attempted to revive the two on their way to the nearby UCSD Thornton Hospital in nearby La Jolla.
The duo suffered major injuries to the head and broken bones that caused the death of the two.
In an interview with Will's parents who was John W. Ferrell in real life, Mary and Hubert Ferrell said their sonn died while doing one of the things he loved the most.
Will was a graduate of the University of California where he finished his Sports Information Degree. Will was born on July 16, 1968. He was 36.

UPDATE THE SECOND: A story on E! Online gives the background on how this hoax made its way to i-Newswire, and why we'll likely never know the person behind it:

"The editor thought it sounded like a real press release," said Eric Borgos, president of Impulse Communications, the parent company of iNewswire. "Maybe the person didn't know who Will Ferrell was, which didn't help."
The Ferrell release went up on iNewswire at about 12 or 1 p.m. (ET), Borgos said. After being asked about it a couple of hours later by inquiring reporters, he said, it was removed from the site.
"The problem is we never really had serious news stories like this before," Borgos said. "In cases like this in the future, we'll definitely check it out."
iNewswire tried, but failed to find the source of the bogus Ferrell story. The trickster, a non-paying customer, used a proxy server--the ISP address can't be traced, Borgos explained. All that's known about the anonymous user is that he or she tried, but failed to post about 10-15 other press releases on the site Tuesday, he said, including one that clarified that "Will Ferrell is not really dead."

As promised, here's the initial Google News screenshot. Also note that the other top stories about Ferrell have to do with a mistake at the Oscars that saw his name misspelled on a giant screen as he and Steve Carell were presenting an award. All in all, a mistake-ridden couple of weeks for Frank The Tank.

Pfizer corrects CEO's statement

This AP story is based on a statement from Pfizer, which we have so far been unable to locate.

NEW YORK (AP) - Pfizer Inc. CEO Hank McKinnell was too exuberant when discussing the company's inhaled insulin drug Exubera, saying it was approved by U.S. regulators when it hasn't been.
The world's largest drug company issued a correction of the statement McKinnell made while being interviewed Friday by cable news channel CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
After the interview, McKinnell went back on CNBC to apologize for what he said was "clearly a confusion in our own (Pfizer's) communications."
McKinnell said Pfizer expected the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to make a decision about the drug shortly.
On Thursday, European regulators approved Exubera. Analysts have said that Exubera's sales could reach $1 billion.
On Thursday, Pfizer also received approval from the FDA for Sutent, a drug to combat a rare stomach cancer and advanced kidney cancer. Sutent sales could also reach blockbuster status, according to some analysts. Link

Forbes also have a story up.

 

Overzealous press releasing

From a column in the Times (UK):

A press release from George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, pings into our inbox.
Highlighting a recent fraud story, it says that "half of all applications for tax credits had to be halted". Moments later a correction arrives. Instead of "half" this one reads "almost 40,000". Actually, the story was about only online applications for tax credits (a small percentage of all applications), and "almost 40,000" is nowhere near half even of these, but somewhere under a tenth. What a Chancellor he'll make. Link

Unreliable source

An article by The Associated Press on Friday about a report by the Center for Public Integrity on travel by White House employees that was paid for by outside groups included erroneous information from the center on the trips' value, the number of officials who took more than $10,000 in trips and the amounts spent by several sponsors. The center attributed the mistakes to what it called data entry errors discovered after its release of the report.

Between 1998 and 2004, the trips were valued at $1.5 million, not $2.3 million. The number of White House officials who took more than $10,000 in sponsored trips was 23, not 51. One official, not 29 officials, worked in Vice President Al Gore's office. AFL-CIO unions spent $18,087, not $200,000. The World Anti-Doping Agency, not the AFL-CIO, was the largest sponsor of such trips, spending $40,260. Eli Lilly and Co. spent $2,226, not more than $20,000. Harvard University spent $28,857, not $85,137. Link

Civil air navigation operator corrects newspaper

This was put over the wire yesterday:

The Financial Post reported today that, ". . .air traffic controller NAV CANADA is owed US $1.9 billion by Northwest." This statement is incorrect. As of September 16, 2005, there are no monies owed by Northwest Airlines to NAV CANADA.

NAV CANADA, the country's provider of civil air navigation services, is a non-share capital, private corporation with operations coast to coast providing air traffic control, flight information, weather briefings, aeronautical information services, airport advisory services and electronic aids to navigation.

Link

Publisher corrects AP over series of errors

This is unusual. Yet very familiar.

Newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises Inc. presented its Mid-Year Media Review in New York City on Wednesday, and AP ran a series of articles about the company's results. According to Lee,  every one of the six AP stories that AP pushed over the wire on Wednesday contained errors. Errors that AP was unable to correct before they ended up being published and cached in search engines. So, in what Lee acknowledged was an "unusual" move, the company "reluctantly" put out a press release to correct the errors. The release begins:

Lee Enterprises, Incorporated (NYSE: LEE), reluctantly issued this unusual news release today correcting errors in a series of six stories distributed Wednesday by The Associated Press after Lee's presentation to analysts at the Mid-Year Media Review in New York City.

It then proceeds to list all of the items that the company says AP got wrong (too many for us to reprint here). Editor & Publisher has a good story about this dispute. Here's a statement they ran from AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll:

"The bureau made some errors in the coverage and those were corrected in cycle yesterday, both on the Iowa wire and the national business wire. The Lee spokesman disagreed with the approach to the story that ran on the national business wire and said so. That's his prerogative -- plenty of people disagree with news calls, which are by nature subjective."

We saw two AP corrections yesterday regarding Lee  and this is the longer of the two:

In a June 22 story about the financial outlook for Lee Enterprises Inc., The Associated Press reported erroneously that the company's acquisition of Pulitzer Inc. will cause earnings to decline 8 cents to 10 cents per share for the rest of 2005. Instead, Lee expects the decline to occur in its fiscal year 2005, which ends in September.
The AP also reported incorrectly that Lee officials described their increase in classified revenues as lackluster. In fact, those revenues were up 5.3 percent in the eight months through May.
The story also implied that revenues for Lee and Pulitzer combined had risen 5.1 percent overall this year. In fact, that figure represents the revenues only at Lee.

So, what do we have here? A newspaper publisher is shocked at how incorrect information can be reported and then widely distributed nearly instantly. In order to disseminate what it sees as the correct information, the publisher has to resort to a press release since AP's corrections are seen as inadequate. AP, meanwhile, acknowledges it made a few errors and says that the publisher is merely disagreeing with its take on the information.

The reality is that this kind of thing happens all the time. What makes this unusual is the fact that we have two news organizations going back and forth over the issue of accuracy, with one pointing out the inadequacy of corrections (hallelujah!). The only reason this has become news is the fact that it's one news organization pitted against another. When it's just an average person or company, nobody takes notice.

Here's what a Lee spokesman told E&P: "Once published, this bad information never goes away. It will appear in search engines far beyond our lifetimes." Amen. This underscores our frequent criticism that corrections, as they exist today, fail to ensure that readers receive the correct information. Lee just learned that the hard way.

The question is: will the company apply this newly learned lesson in its newsrooms?

Everything is a promo opportunity

We occasionally give the media a rest and turn our sights on the PR world whenever we can find a corrected press release worth noting. Thanks to an overzealous band and its promo crazy record company, we found something suitable.

On April 25 a release was put on the wire by JetSpeed Records trumpeting that one of its bands, Nixon Nation, had a track in the upcoming Cameron Crowe movie. (They even went so far as to offer a contest to win tickets to the film's premiere.) Here's an excerpt:

Nixon Nation has landed a track on the new Cameron Crowe Movie coming out this summer called" Elizabethtown". This is such a major accomplishment for an indie act, considering how well known EVERY acts music used in a Cameron Crowe's movies are or become once he exposes them through his Feature Films!

Then on Friday they were forced to correct and retract that release and issue a new one, saying:

On April 25th 2005, it was incorrectly reported that JetSpeed Records Act "Nixon Nation" had secured a track on the upcoming Cameron Crowe Movie called "Elizabethtown".

"Incorrectly reported"? Perhaps "incorrectly stated" might be a little more accurate. But with that little mea culpa out of the way, the label plows ahead and does its best to turn a downer retraction into a totally awesome plug for the band!!!

Nixon Nation has secured a great deal of recent attention by the unprecedented surge in CD Sales since the release of their current album entitled "13 Songs". The band is touring extensively, getting fantastic airplay, making plans for a Music Video...and have secured placement of 4 tracks on an upcoming Independent Film to be released later this year.

But we're still really sorry!

JetSpeed Records and Nixon Nation regret any confusion and problems caused by the earlier erroneous release. It is our practice to fact check and to proof all press before release. Clearly, an error was made and we are sorry to any and all we may have offended or hurt by this mistake.

...sorry this band is so awesome!

With that said....
Please catch Nixon Nation at ALL of these regional dates...before they leave on their Nationwide Tour! [Dates deleted]