Did you Chek that?

I love newspapers because they're permanent. A Web site might be edited every five minutes, but a printed newspaper is here to stay. And that's why mistakes in print are so much worse than those online or on video. Of course, they all stink in my book.

One of my former news writing students found this headline, from our local paper, The (Greeley) Tribune. The name of the writer is Anton Chekhov. I know it's a Russian name, and those Russian names are so hard to spell. But that's why we fact check. And when it comes to fact-checking, names are the most important thing to check, or Chekhov, if you will. And fact-checking is rather easy, thanks to the Web. All you have to do is Google the name as you think it's spelled, and Google will come up with the right name. That's what I did for this post. I put in "Checkhov" and Google corrected me.

I guess nobody bothered to tell the editors at The Tribune, because as I write this, four days after publication of the offending headline, the paper's Web site still contains the misspelling.