The Worcester Telegram & Gazette printed a box on the front page today with the results of the preliminary election.
These results were totally wrong. However, the front page article got the results correct.
You can find the correct results at the City website (PDF) or at Worcester Activist.
The only “Who didn’t” listed correctly was Maritza Cruz; the other 5 all made the top 12, and are thus on the ballot. Supporters of Alaimo, Callahan, Dellasante, Grandone, and Mahoney must have all been pretty sad when they found out their candidates did not, in fact, “make the cut.”
If you had randomly assigned people to categories, you would have done better than this chart.
This especially distorts the performance of Grace Ross, who was the most successful challenger, coming in at #6 and beating 2 incumbents in the process.
A chart on the front page of some editions of today’s Telegram & Gazette gave incorrect results.
They owe people a pretty serious correction.
Thanks to an anonymous friend for the scans of the paper.
Update: The apology includes a nice chart:
The template had been produced earlier in the day to determine space needs and was mistakenly left on the page by the editor.
Am I the only person who was absolutely horrified by this?
I don’t know if I feel about this as strongly as you do, but it does bother me.
Somebody (probably Doc Searls or Dave Winer, I’ll look it up) said that in this day and age, the purpose of a local paper is to cover city government, routine crime news, and high school sports. Anything else you can probably get somewhere else, cheaper and better.
So when the local paper totally screws up on one of the basics, like reporting election results, I’m shocked. I’m not one to complain about typos in front page articles (like many letter writers), because I’ve edited stuff and I know that mistakes are going to happen no matter how good the editing process, but this . . . this is way worse than a typo. This hurts people’s feelings and could impact an election.
Exactly…it’s that this is something we are counting on them to get right. Many of us are getting, say, our international news from somewhere else. But the local election? They are about it!