Parthenon Errors in Capital Classic Coverage

In reviewing The Parthenon’s coverage of the Marshall basketball games against WVU, the first and most egregious error I noted was a simple lack of fact-checking.

In the women’s basketball story, the final graf referred to Marshall looking to hand WVU its fifth loss. However, WVU only had one loss, not four.

From my standpoint, no errors should be considered “acceptable.” However, while a lack of subject-verb agreement or a misspelled word constitutes poor writing, a factual error constitutes not only poor writing, but also lazy journalism. In my book, it’s an inexcusable mistake.

The writing also suffered in regards to time elements – a mistake I’ve admittedly been prone to. The men’s basketball story began with a time element. Christ isn’t back (to the best of my knowledge) and even if He was, it certainly isn’t the focus of this story. So, the time element should not be included in the lede. In addition, it is also separated from the verb.

Finally, I noted a basic capitalization error. In the headline of the women’s story, “Capital Classic” isn’t capitalized. It should be. It’s a proper noun, and therefore it should be capitalized.

All in all, The Parthenon’s coverage had errors that could have been caught with adequate proofreading. However, it was a very inexperienced team that produced the edition, and I’m sure they’re learning from their mistakes.