Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Journalism: The job for people who are not good at numbers

The internet portal T-online.de can't even get numbers right. In an article about an unemployed American person who won the lottery, they always said that he won one million dollars. Everything went well in the article until the stupid author actually decided to type "one million dollars" with numbers. Ouch... you can see the result here:



Every millionaire would be jealous. But well, what's the big difference between a million and a billion. He might as well have won a bigillion.

Another section at the website is the motorsport section. It is often updated, so you get a lot of news about motorsport that go beyond formula one. The only thing that is not updated is the main page itself, in some way.



Do I get this right? It's already 2013 and the website still talks about its motorsport section as being "2011"?
I would excuse this if it was a private website with only a few clicks (like mine). But this thing here gets millions of clicks/views a month, and people get paid well to do their job.

Some people check balance sheets, others check machines, and yet others check feet, whiskey and stuff like that. Maybe T-online.de employees should check less whiskey and check back on their own web content a little more often.