Globe Public Editor: Meet a tireless reader who keeps The Globe on its toes
I hear from my share (okay, maybe more than my share) of critical readers, but I also have the distinct pleasure of hearing from some very smart Canadians who love good journalism and expect perfection from The Globe and Mail.
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I hear from my share (okay, maybe more than my share) of critical readers, but I also have the distinct pleasure of hearing from some very smart Canadians who love good journalism and expect perfection from The Globe and Mail.
One regular correspondent is Alain Gingras, a recently retired diplomat who worked in Malaysia, Syria, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and a dozen other places. In total, he says, he has visited more than 50 countries and gone around the world several times. He would be a great partner in a trivia contest (in fact, I have asked him for a little fact-checking help on place names in Southeast Asia).
Now living outside Gatineau, Que., Mr. Gingras is a voracious reader of the newspaper and a stickler for accuracy as well as the correct use of French accents (which should be a given in a bilingual country). He recently caught this in one of the sections he likes to read the most. “Dear obit people,” he wrote. “In 1960, [the late Eldon] Comfort moved his family to Tanganyika, not Tanzania. Tanzania did not exist then. In 1964, Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania.”
It’s not just The Globe and Mail. He catches errors in several leading publications — I have forwarded his e-mails pointing out miscues in The New York Times to its corrections desk.
However, like most readers, Mr. Gingras does not just expect journalism to be factual; he also loves great storytelling and clever writing. For example, he said, “they did some kind of survey in the States (no doubt) about the best journalistic title ever. The winner was ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar.’ It was written by Vincent A. Musetto, the desk guy of the New York Post, on April 15, 1983.”
To read the rest of this column, please go to the Globe and Mail’s website, where it was originally published.
