June 17, 2014

When the Los Angels Kings won the Stanley Cup at home, lots of significant others, officials, and other folks came down to the ice to celebrate. As reported by BuzzFeed and Uproxx, this resulted in a remarkable faceplant by one woman who unwisely wore high heels on the ice:

That slip up caused another: BuzzFeed’s post mistakenly said the Kings are based on Sacramento, rather than L.A. (Sacramento’s basketball team is called the Kings.) That resulted in this amusing correction:

This post originally identified the Kings as being from Sacramento, not Los Angeles. The author clearly cares much more about faceplants than sports. We regret the error.

It’s funny and it conforms to the recently implement BuzzFeed correction policy, which I previously wrote about. Among other things, the style guide advised that an error in a lighthearted post can match the tone:

The correction’s tone should echo the tone of the item, in keeping with its gravity. For a factual error in, say, a funny list, the language can be fairly colloquial and even humorous as long as it contains the basic building blocks — “we got something wrong, and here is the correct information”; whereas for a news error, the language should be more sober and direct. A dumb mistake on a list of weird facts about Love Actually can begin: “GAH.” An error of fact in a news story should usually be labeled “CORRECTION.”

 

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Craig Silverman (craig@craigsilverman.ca) is an award-winning journalist and the founder of Regret the Error, a blog that reports on media errors and corrections, and trends…
Craig Silverman

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