Fikkle Fame
Time magazine copy editor Dan Adkison ended his run as a Jeopardy champion last night. Amazingly, last night’s show included a category of questions about Time magazine pieces. The Final Jeopardy question was: “This state is known as the ‘Cockpit of the Revolution’ for all the battles there, including a pivotal one in December 1776.”
Adkison guessed North Carolina. Agony! It was New Jersey. A Poynter correspondent watching the show says Adkison did get to give a response about copy-editing. Cindy Vanderbur of Madison, Ind. (where “nothing ever happens,” she says in her “Hometown Howdy”) moves on. According to a Grand Junction, Colo., Daily Sentinel article (a small portion of which is in front of a paywall), Adkison won $38,400 while he was on the show.
Among Adkison’s competition: Mike Garrett, a former newspaper editor from Kamloops, British Columbia, who told the Kamloops Daily News that Vanderbur was “a master at the buzzer.” Garrett watched 800 episodes of Jeopardy to prepare, he told BCLocalNews.com earlier this month.
In online discussion of last night’s episode, one Jeopardy fan said Adkison’s mistake was going too early at a books category.
Last night’s show was taped in December; this past weekend episodes of Jeopardy’s “Power Players” edition were taped in Washington, D.C. Politico’s Tim Mak watched the tapings, which he’d agreed not to report on, and a rehearsal round, which he could. Thomas Friedman muffed a question about Ohio history, he reports, and Chuck Todd dominated with his knowledge of Pluto. || Related: Time magazine copy editor wins two nights on ‘Jeopardy,’ returns tonight | Did ‘Jeopardy’-crushing copy editor make — gasp — a grammatical error?
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