Monday, October 19, 2009

This is called coverage of the EU?

The UK's Daily Telegraph has outdone itself. Here is the latest example of why the "serious" press in the UK can't claim to be giving Brits the coverage of the EU that they deserve.

The article seems not to have been written by a Telegraph correspondent (no author is identified); it may have come from one of the news agencies. But it refers to a "Leonard Orba", who is identified as the man "in charge of the EU Bookshop project".

Of course the man's name is Orban and not Orba, and he isn't just some project manager. He's a European Commissioner. OK, so he's not Commissioner for Agriculture, or Competition, or Environment. He's Commissioner for Multilingualism. Not exactly high profile. But you can't call yourself a serious publication if you allow errors of this type into reports.

Perhaps just as bad as the misreporting of his name and job is the missed opportunity that the report represents. There is a lot to say about the EU Bookshop and the broader Europeana project. For example, some see Europeana as a strategic European counter to the cultural threat represented by Google's efforts to digitise the world's libraries. There are some serious cultural and economic issues at stake.

But all in all, what the Telegraph provides here is pretty much worthless. Shame on them.

4 comments:

Nicholas Whyte said...

Looks to me like it was transcribed from a Frankfurt Book Fair press release by a non-native English speaker! Phrases like "cost of about more than £2 million" and "now counts 23" are not exactly standard...

Linda Margaret said...

The pressure to produce content fast is killing a lot of the quality. Of course this lack of quality is also killing the newspapers faster than just online content alone...

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