The Toronto Sun Project

I am I guess a bit of a nerd. I've done incredibly nerdy things in my life. Maybe it's not nerdy though; it's gotta be some type of anal-retentive disorder. Like the time in 2004 that I 'worked for' the Toronto Sun. I used to get so incredibly irate about the spelling errors in the Toronto Sun newspaper; it would drive me insane when I found them. I mean, c'mon! This is a published, widely distributed paper! How could they allow sooo many errors to make it to print? How could "We're are going to have a summer shower" actually be one of their headlines??!!! How does one mistake 'growing up in Toronto' for 'grown up in Toronto'? How does an editor allow the first published paper of that year, on the 2nd page to have a heading that spells 'Torontonians' as 'Toronontians'? How does that happen and people still keep their jobs? Is that not a grave disrespect to me as an intelligent reader and a fellow Toronontian? I just didn't get it and no one could answer me! I ended up mentioning this to Andy Donato who is an artist and works for the Sun as a cartoonist (I know Andy and his wife through a members-only golf club that I used to be a Supervisor at and they were members of and they are both very sweet and genuine people who I would occasionally dog-sit for while they went on vacations). I told him one day about this and he told me to do something about it! That was all the motivation I needed. There was no point in doing my usual writing of a strongly-worded letter to the Editor-in-Chief. This was a much bigger issue for me than bad service. I felt it was a disservice to my country; the Sun is a national newspaper so I'm sure that it isn't just the Toronto version that is so lax with copy-reading and editing. I felt that I was not alone in my views on this subject and I knew that my fellow countrymen also must have this disdain for the lack of respect we as readers were being shown! I guarantee that this is a main reason people no longer read the Sun, other than political reasons. I love the Sun but find this point impossible to bypass. I can't love it with the errors, I tried but it was too big a crime for me to simply overlook. I had to show them how bad it truly was if I was going to make any bit of difference as just pointing it out to them I was certain wouldn't work. This must have been done already I reasoned. So what could I do? Well, I could really show them exactly how bad it was, and that's exactly what I did. For one month -December 11, 2003 - January 11, 2004- I read and edited every single word of that paper, front to back excluding advertisements. Just headlines and articles. Everything the paper had sole control over. It took me forever to do this as I of course had a full time job and a brimming social life at this point. But it became a very important part of my day to saunter to the newspaper box at the corner, grab the paper and catalog them by dates, and pore over them with my highlighters and pens. Every time I found an error, I'd circle it, then post it note the page to tag it for later. I did this at night, every lunch hour at work, all the time I could spare went into this. When I have a point to prove, good luck getting my focus redirected. Once I had all the papers stacked up in my room with all the errors tagged in all 30+ papers, I went to work. Like a kidnapper with a ransom note, I sat on the floor of my living room and with my exacto knife I cut out right from the paper the errors, had a notebook to keep track of what date/page/article/writer each error came from, and then filed those little cut outs from the newspaper chronologically. I'd do this while watching Soccer Saturdays with my dad. That way I could bounce my comments off of him and show him all the words that got past the staff. Once this incredibly tedious task was done, I then went about gluing each of those little pieces of paper to its corresponding page that I had drafted on the computer. The page would have the date of the paper, then each error from that paper would be listed by page, then writer, then heading, then how it read in the paper, and then how it SHOULD have read in the paper. And then I glued the actual error right there next to it. That is pretty anal, isn't it? Not only did I do this project in the first place but I wanted there to be absolutely no way to dispute my claims. So this tedious task of cutting out these micro pieces of newspapers and gluing them all so they lined up with the corresponding identification and correction had to be done as it was the only way to show that they didn't need to take my word for it. Here they are right from your paper. How many spelling errors do you think is acceptable? What would you guess?

For one month, a newspaper that boasts a readership of 2.15 MILLION readers a WEEK allowed 217 spelling errors into their paper. 217 spelling errors/major grammar errors were found by me through just one readthrough in only one month of publishing. I'm sure there were more I didn't catch on my skim-through. Is someone not doing their job? Or with that type of viewship, maybe you can afford another helper on the payroll. It's important, isn't it? I mean, they're a newspaper for goodness sakes, surely this will be a big deal?! I had my 'project' bound at Staples and was now ready to send to the paper. I first brought a copy to Andy, who looked at me like I was a little crazy but also caught a glimmer of amusement in his eyes at it. I gave him a copy and also sent a few copies to the Editor-in-Chief. And for me, that was that. I felt a sense of relief that I had at least attempted to do something not only for my fellow readers but also for this paper. They obviously had no idea that they were churning out such a sub-par product, and with a lot of competition for readship, I figured I was helping them out too. I also had wanted to be an editor and I found through doing that project that I did in fact enjoy it. It's not like you can walk on to a decent editing job with no schooling or prior work experience, so this was my way of trying it out and if I wasn't already way past the point of college, I may have considered going to school for it.
The reason I'm writing about this is our friend Tido was over last night and we were talking about it again as he was with me at my apartment years ago when I got the call. We were sitting around listening to hip hop and my phone rang, which I answered without turning down the music. It was the Editor-in-Chief of the Toronto Sun calling. I got Tido to quickly turn down the music and I stood up and started walking around. He informed me that he had just seen my project (by this point a few months had past since I'd sent it to him) and was calling me to inform me that him and his staff were very embarassed by what I had done, and were also very impressed by it. Yes, they did in fact employ full time editors, but these had simply been missed. He also wanted to know what I was hoping to get out of the experience. That took me by surprise as I wasn't prepared at that moment for this conversation, but I said a better quality paper and a full time editing job. He laughed and asked me what school I went to. I told him I wasn't a student. No, this wasn't a school project, this was me just doing this in my spare time. He offered me an internship. They don't offer internships to people who aren't University students majoring in Journalism, but he offered me one right then. I of course couldn't take it; it's full time with little to no pay. I work full time and can't simply give that up to go and work at the Sun without getting paid to, but the point is for me that it was offered. That was the moment my hard work paid off.
Now, the Sun still has a lot of errors, I didn't unfortunately change the paper the way I wanted to, but at least I can be assured that heads were most likely ripped off because a girl in her spare time could do what these people get paid not to do, and that there were some embarassed editing staff walking around that day. Good enough for me.


Now I wrote about that hoping that the backlash is not every single error on here pointed out to me. Please, I know there are spelling mistakes all over this blog; when I catch them I do fix them, but some get by me and I am not super-anal on this site as it's just a casual blog. I am going to be printing out a lot of this to send to my Grandma in Scotland over the next week so she can be apprised of all that is going on too, and I'll edit that with a fine-toothed comb, but I haven't been regiment about this in this forum as I'm not thinking this is being read by 2.15 million people every week like the Toronto Sun. If I was getting paid for it, it'd be a different story, believe me!