“Excel” Energy Center: Copyeditors absent during RNC
Shortened permalink:
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
My last name is pretty unique. It’s a variation of the more common Kelleher or even Kelliher. It’s rather easy to track online mentions of me as well as my relatives with a simple set of recurring searches and a Google Alert for “keliher.” There’s almost no pollution from irrelevant results.
Until recently.
In January 2007, a woman by the name of Margaret Anderson Kelliher was named speaker of the house in the Minnesota state legislature. I’m not related to her, and we don’t even have the same last name (she has two Ls, I have one). But all sorts of people, even respected journalists at the local smart-news shop MinnPost.com, misspell her last name, causing my Google Alerts more pollution.
I noticed a whole new wave of “where’s your editor?” writing during the Republican National Convention. At first, several people claimed they were looking forward to “the convention in Minneapolis” — but it was in St. Paul, the capitol city that is dwarfed by Minneapolis, the larger of the Twin Cities. More often, though, another error popped up.
The convention was hosted at the Xcel Energy Center. It’s the home of the Minnesota Wild and named after a local utility company.
But many journalists assumed it was the Excel Energy Center — even some journalists right here in the Twin Cities (gasp!).
Committing either of these errors — “Keliher” instead of “Kelliher” or “Excel Energy Center” instead of “Xcel Energy Center” — would have resulted in a serious scolding from any of my journalism professors. Maybe a letter to the editor is warranted…
Photo courtesy of scbluedevil on Flickr (edited by me)
Related items
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment