Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Correction shows Gotlieb isn't testing limits that much

There's always a bit of "There but for the grace of God go I," in seeing another reporter's story generate an excruciatingly long list of corrections. When you're a reporter, any of your bad days at the office can become very public. Still, one can only wonder how BusinessWeek's March 3 story on GroupM's Irwin Gotlieb, "An Ad Man Tests the Limits" could result in a correction approaching 150 words and highlighting four factual errors, some of which were central to the story's premise, that Gotlieb is pursuing some new revenue streams that might be seen as controversial. As one example, the original story claimed that Gotlieb predicted GroupM might not even represent advertisers within five to seven years. Not true, says the correction. Someone slipped me a copy of the correction from the print edition, and I'm running it in its entirety here. In his column today, fellow Mediapost columnist Jack Feuer described it as the Iliad of corrections. Well, at least BW did spell Gotlieb with only one 't'.

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