Winerip’s hatchet job

Another email about Winerip's hatchet job:

 

I was a journalism major at UNC Chapel Hill, which is (of course) a public university. The policy of the journalism school was that if you had a fact error (e.g. you spelled someone's name wrong or got the name of an organization incorrect), it was an automatic minus 50. Any other spelling or grammar error was an automatic minus 15. Then, the professors graded the actual content of what you wrote. With these high standards, we learned quickly to prioritize accuracy and double-check for spelling or grammar issues.

 

Winerip's article would have scored a -150. That's actually a generous score, for it assumes a perfect score on the content. It also would have failed in any news writing course, for it was clearly an editorial piece that would not have been allowed by our professors.

 

It was shameful that the New York Times published such a piece.