Dateline, schmateline
To: The New York Times
From: Janet Dagley Dagley
Subject: Misleading information in dateline on worker safety article
I applaud you on your series on worker safety, which began Sunday with the article, "When Workers Die: A Trench Caves In; a Young Worker is Dead. Is it a Crime?" (By the way, I don't think I've ever seen so much punctuation in a headline, but that's beside the point).
The dateline is "Cincinnati" -- but the incident did not take place in Cincinnati. It did, as reporter David Barstow writes, take place "north of Cincinnati," but then that would have been the case if it had happened in Toledo, Detroit, Toronto, or the North Pole.
As a former reporter for the Dayton Daily News, I recognized from your photo credits (Montgomery County Coroner's Office) that if the incident took place in Montgomery County, it must have been near Dayton, not near Cincinnati. As I discovered not from your article but from a 10-second Google search, it happened in Miamisburg, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, not of Cincinnati.
Cincinnati is in Hamilton County. Between Hamilton County and Montgomery County, where the accident happened, there are two other counties, Butler and Warren.
So could you explain why the dateline was "Cincinnati" rather that "Dayton" (the county seat of Montgomery County) or "Miamisburg" (the city where the accident occurred)? Was it because your reporter flew into Cincinnati? In that case, it might as well have been "Erlanger, Kentucky," since that's where the Cincinnati airport is. Did your reporter stay in a Cincinnati hotel? Are some of Mr. Walters' survivors now living in Cincinnati? It's confusing.
It appears you're going after a major prize in this investigation, and I wish you success. You'd stand a greater chance of winning, however, if your dateline weren't misleading. Unfortunately, those kinds of mistakes reinforce the stereotype made famous in Saul Steinberg's map, "View of the World from 9th Avenue." (That's the New Yorker cover showing that from a New Yorker's point of view, everything kind of runs together once you get west of the Hudson.)
You never know: one or more of the judges deciding on prizes for your series just might be from that nondescript area just past Jersey: the Midwest. And one of those judges just might know that Cincinnati is NOT in Montgomery County.
Best wishes,
Janet Dagley Dagley
Hoboken, NJ
So far, no reply, except from the Times' autoresponder.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @6:04 PM
|
22.12.03 |
|