Where Have I Been?

It’s summer in Ukraine. The kids are out of school and summer camps are springing up all over the country like poppies. I had my summer camp the first week of June, then went to Kiev for a date with the FSOT.

After that, I headed here…

Varva/Варва from Brian Woods on Vimeo.

…for a little R&R with my host mom. After that, I headed southwest to Pervomaisk to visit my language teacher. Initially a little bad weather…

Pervomaisk Thunderstorm from Brian Woods on Vimeo.

…but we didn’t let that spoil our fun. That very afternoon we went to the river…

Pervamaisk - The First River from Brian Woods on Vimeo.

…had pizza, threw the Frisbee, er I mean the throwing disc and played a little volleyball. The trip was topped off with some rafting.

Pervomaisk Rafting from Brian Woods on Vimeo.

The Dateline

So how important is the dateline in a news story? You don’t have to look much further than the Washington Post to find out. They recently published a story about a Vienna man getting run over by a Verizon truck. I know when I first read the story, I was shocked that Verizon had a presence in Austria. I looked the article over for some clarification on exactly where this particular Vienna was located.

Scrolling down, I saw a link that offered more information on Vienna. Success! Surely this would solve the mystery!

The Mystery Solved?  Not so fast.

The Mystery Solved? Not so fast.

So what do you see when you click that link? It is pretty fascinating, especially because it is different today than it was yesterday when I first started investigating this.

Vienna, Not Vienna

Vienna, Not Vienna

It turns out that the link is for the Austrian Vienna, but now the Washington Post article is in effect punking the website. It won’t take many more clicks until the Evri website shows that this event actually did happen in Austria, instead of the Virginia suburb I am inclined to believe is the actual location.

So what do we learn from this? The first lesson should be if you are writing about a location with an ambiguous name, you should clarify the location. In this case, how many people are there on the planet that would default to Virginia as the location of Vienna when they heard the name of the city? Not too many. For a local news outlet, this is less a problem, but for an internationally read and regarded newspaper, this is pretty serious. I don’t think high school journalism students would make the same mistake.

The second lesson is for Evri: Don’t trust computers to be in charge of your content. There needs to be a person there to sort these things out. Your site is listed in beta, so maybe there is time for you to figure out a cost effective way of stopping this sort of punking of your content.

It’s the 21st century, folks. Let’s learn to be global in our thinking and put a stop to senseless disinformation.

Buy This Book!

The Septic's Companion: A British Slang Dictionary - A dictionary of British slang, written by a Scotsman living in America

Editors

Bakhchisaray’s New City Area

Bakhchisaray - New City from Brian Woods on Vimeo.