Thursday, July 10, 2008

NY Times Magazine does Miami...and gets some of it wrong!

The New York Times has posted its upcoming Sunday Magazine cover piece on the website a few days early; a long piece on Cuban-American-Miami politics titled "Will Little Havana Go Blue?" written by David Reiff.

Reiff, who is the son of the late Susan Sontag, belongs to a small, select group. He's one of those intellectual writers whose work is only read by other intellectual writer types.

There's also a slide show that accompanies the piece with all the cliché shots: Calle Ocho, the Versailles, Domino Park, and inexplicably, a boring shot from Lincoln Road, which some New York editor has apparently decided is the hub of Cuban-American politics.

I hope, however, that the piece is more accurate than the captions that go along with two of the pictures in the slide show.According to the New York Times that's Raul Martinez, above..... (Click images to enlarge)

...and that's Joe Garcia.

How could this happen?

It could be something as simple as a production error.

Or the photographer, after a long assignment, confused Martinez and Garcia and submitted the wrong captions. I hope that they got them right in the printed version of the Magazine...otherwise the Times is going to have to print a correction for a mistake that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Either way, it's inexcusable.

I haven't read the entire story yet. But I tend to lose interest whenever I read a piece on Miami politics that's written by a writer who can't come up with anything more imaginative than interviewing a politician (over coffee) at the Versailles.

2 comments:

  1. You're expecting accuracy in journalism when the copy editor and proofreading jobs that haven't been eliminated have been outsourced!

    Newspapers and magazines are dead.

    ReplyDelete
  2. How can you characterize David Reiff the way you do?
    Do you know him? Are you part of that implied elite group of readers?
    I'd like to know who else you lump into that group.
    Reiff is one of the most balanced writers I know.

    ReplyDelete

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