I’m feeling bad for Nikki Haley today, because she was trying to do the right thing, and say the right thing, but the medium got in the way.
Below is an image of what appeared in her Twitter feed yesterday morning:
The problem, of course, was that she posted on Instagram, and when that autoposted to Twitter, it cut her off in mid-thought. What she actually said was:
South Carolina made history this year by passing education reform. We will no longer educate children based on where they are born. Through reading coaches, technology investments, and expanding charter schools we just confirmed that we want our children to be the future workforce for our growing high tech jobs! #ItIsAGreatDayInSC
And we should all be able to agree with that, even the Democrats who won’t give her credit for actually meaning it. (Well, they might not go for the charter schools part, but the rest of it…)
Here’s the corrected version of her Tweet:
South Carolina made history this year by passing education reform. http://t.co/1mPcrc5jIf
— Nikki Haley (@nikkihaley) June 9, 2014
Moral of the story: If you’re going to post to a medium that automatically posts to your Twitter feed, always write it for Twitter, and make sure it fits there first. Otherwise, it’s just too tricky to make sure this doesn’t happen to you.
People pay me to tell them stuff like that these days. Consider this a freebie, and don’t ever say I never gave you anything…
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Why should it be necessary to include the link URL gibberish in the post? Why not just put a little link icon and save space?
Why not just pick up a phone or hold a news conference or just put out a statement to the press however it was done in the “olden days”?
Yeah
Because she doesn’t believe in going through the press to reach the people.
Why should she (or any elected official)? If there is a way to send out a message that doesn’t get edited, why wouldn’t she use that mechanism? The press is free to take the same message and print it.
Well, in her case, because of the simple fact that without an editor, she frequently looks worse than she would otherwise.
But I don’t expect her to come to that conclusion. Resenting the media is now too much part of her makeup.
Which is not the way I would have expected Nikki to turn out, 8 or 10 years ago…
The very least she should do is hire a pro and empower that person to edit everything she puts out, ESPECIALLY her Facebook posts, before the public can see them…
Everybody needs an editor. I’m deeply embarrassed that for most of the day yesterday, I had a typo in the headline of a much-read post.
It was especially bad because the headline is all people see on Twitter and Facebook, and this post (the Graham one), got some attention through those media.
Everybody needs somebody to backstop…
If she doesn’t have someone proofreading her stuff, that’s a mistake.
But based on the errors I see lately in The State articles, a good editor may be hard to find. Autocorrect and spellcheck have replaced actual human editing.
When you you going to add a feature that lets us edit our comments? I know I fall victim to the typographical error quite frequently, but I’m not the only one…
When the blog brings in enough revenue for me to pay somebody to figure that out for me.
Back when I started my post-newspaper blog, I tried to set up a system in which commenters registered — that might have led to having the power to edit. But it was a big mess — people kept having trouble with it, and I couldn’t duplicate the trouble at my end, and I didn’t know what was wrong, so I just dropped it…
No, autocorrect and spellcheck have not replaced human editors. They are a nice extra layer — they may catch something you missed. When I was at the paper, a lot of us would spell-check at the very end of the editing process, just to see if it caught anything. Sometimes (but not all that often) it would. It just took a second, so why not?
But those algorithms are as likely to introduce errors as to catch them. For instance, Word always wanted to change “Sanford” to “Sangfroid” — which was an accurate description of an element of his character, but not a point I was trying to make. And if you’re in a hurry, you might click Save instead of cancel.
No, there have always been errors in newspapers, a function of the speed at which the copy is churned out and delivered. If you see more errors today (and you do), its because it’s going even faster (stories being posted online immediately, and too little time to go back and fix them) and because there are far, far fewer people, most of them doing more work than journalists had to do in the past.
The MAIN factor is fewer people.
Watt do you mean? I never make a mistake. Autocorrect does it for me!
And far fewer copy editors….
I would be more certain of the outcome, if I knew that our Governor was capable of managing simpler tasks (like tweets).