My New Hobby

July 12, 2008 by ignatiof.

My latest hobby is making fun of vocm.com. I like to count the number of mistakes in their news articles. My record so far is 9 in one article. Here’s one I found today, copied verbatim, without permission, with mistakes listed below. I’m not going to get into the HTML problems or style concerns.

Collision On The Grand Banks
July 12, 2008

There was an usual incident about 160 miles off the coast last night. Maritime Search and Rescue Coordinator, Andy Caines, says it involved a minor collision between a French catamaran-style sail boat, the Traid Union and a Newfoundland crab fishing boat, the August Gale. The Wilfred Grenfell was dispatched to the scene and picked up the eight crew members. They are headed to St. John’s from the Banks but near-zero visibility is keeping speeds low.Caines says the condistions in the area were probably a contributing factor in the collision. No injuries are being reported but marine traffic is advised to be on the look-out for the abandoned and drifting boat.
Also, Friday saw Coast Guard activity off the South Labrador. The Coast Guard auxillary vessel, the Elizabeth Ann, towed a fishing boat, the Robert Bradford, into Cartwright today. The Bradford was disabled by engine failure off Grady Run. They should arrive in port today.

1. The article title should not have the words ‘On The’ capitalized. 
2. The boats’ names are not italicized (5 times)
3. There is no space before the sentence that starts ‘Caines says’
4. ‘Conditions’ is spelled ‘condistions’
5. There is an unrelated news item in an article called ‘Collision On the Grand Banks’
6. In the sentence starting ‘No injuries are being reported’, the two clauses are unrelated.

Posted in Stuff I Hate, The Newfie Times | Print | No Comments »