At long last, someone put together a picture for us of the Qaddafi family, all of whom are on lists for frozen assets in Switzerland: thanks go to Ria Novosti, Russian news agency. Aunts, uncles and the rest of the clan are not here, but the children are all here, with photos and their birthdates.
Bern, centrally located and on the language divide, is the capital of Switzerland
A news story mistake became the story this week, giving us a reminder of why local news providers (that’s us!) are often more credible. Associated Press in the US ran a story about Google Street View and mentioned Zurich, with the editors at a safe distance, in New York. The story noted that Zurich is the capital of Switzerland. Oops. A correction was sent out, and since the first story was picked up by several US media, word for word, a lot of corrections then appeared. Google News for Zurich suddenly had a stream of stories that started with the intriguing one-liner “Zurich is not the capital of Switzerland.”
The problem wasn’t the reporter, I hasten to add: Frank Jordans, who reported the story, has been in Geneva for several years and he’s covered enough political stories from Bern to know it’s the capital. I can only assume an inexperienced sub-editor in the US thought the world might not know the capital of Switzerland, so thought to add it.
Years from now, though, I’m willing to bet a lot of people will still be insisting that Zurich is indeed the capital of that little Alpine nation because after all, they once saw it on the news.
The mistake also underscores the growing problem of aggregated and massaged (rewritten) news stories from sites that do not themselves produce news or have journalists behind them: the story in its original form is still out there, no corrections made.
Pssst: Bern is the capital.
The BBC gives us a fun little travel story
Ice roads: here’s one of those great little feature articles we used to see regularly in mainstream media, but since editors can’t afford to pay for them anymore, they’ve become the domain of bloggers and travel groups, which is too bad. This is one of the BBC’s “from our own correspondent” series, and I fear that with BBC cutbacks in several countries we might see fewer of these, too.