Blogoland

If you're going to gleefully lampoon the NYT for its inability to spell correctly its own publisher's surname (and pen a snark-filled headline like "Nuw Yerk Tumes Names Sulzburger as Chairmun"), you might want to make sure that your own deathless prose is free of, say, obvious mistakes. To wit:

Almost unbelievably, the Times' article didn't even mention the name Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. Not even once. (And shockingly, when it does mention the Sulzberger family, it misspells their name, twice referring to them as "Ochs-Sulzburger."). The piece goes out of it's way to emphasize that the vote withdrawal had to do not with any desire on Morgan Stanley's part to have the company sold, but rather, "to eliminate the company's two classes of stock.

Note to Gal Beckerman. The possessive for "it" does not take an apostrophe.

UPDATE: Beckerman responds to my post via email, but has not yet said whether I can use said response, so I'll wait to post. Suffice it to say that I am not comparing The Times's admittedly boneheaded error with Beckerman's, only to say that when one is writing a post on someone else's typographical slip-up, one should probably be extra carfeful in the copy-editing of their own piece.

And it should be noted that the error is still on the CJR website, a full two days after I pointed it out and Beckerman acknowledged it.