Defending our honor

Credibility is a big deal for the team at Scuttlebutt, with the goal being that each newsletter carries only factual and fair information. You can’t be perfect all the time, and we make our share of mistakes. When we do, we post the correction, and hopefully learn something to keep it from happening again.

Last week we carried a report about the Barcelona World Race that had some information that was not correct. We received the information from the race press agent, and the error had an effect on a third party. This set off a chain of events that still puzzle me. Rather than this third party contacting us, or rather than this third party noting the source of our information and contacting them, they instead sent out a press release to the worldwide sailing media that we screwed up.

On Friday, I learned about this release by reading it in one of these media outlets, which I believe to be the only one that chose to carry the “story”. When I contacted the media outlet, which should have realized that we were not the source of the misinformation, and asked that they amend their story, they refused. This same media outlet goes for more a “quantity over quality” approach, so I guess their response shouldn’t have surprised me. After a few fruitless email exchanges, I gave up, made my corrections, and moved on.

When you sit and wonder, “Where did all the time go,” some of it is always spent dealing with stuff like this. Ugh!