Correcting the Source

This week Washington City Paper’s Erik Wemple goes after our favorite weekly waste of newsprint: The Post’s Sunday Source section.

If you’re not familiar with it, the Sunday Source is some strange amalgamation of the food section, the weekend section, the style/fashion section, and some advice columns thrown in too. Mostly you probably know it as the thin “M” section you toss to get to the coupons and advertising inserts it comes wrapped around.

Wemple points out that given how light it is on content, it has a surprisingly high rate of corrections–in less than two years, it’s had 75 corrections correcting 92 different errors:

Not so bad, you say? Consider that the section is virtually devoid of content. Excluding the start of Carolyn Hax’s advice column, the entire front page of the section clocks in at about 100 words.

Then he goes on to list many of the corrections–from pointing out the wrong night or location for numerous events to messing up how adorn a child’s dresser with blocks that spell a word. (Yea, we’re not sure how that second thing could happen either — it seems pretty straightforward.) In short? “The Sunday Source has fired amusing miscues at every urban psychographic it aims to please,” Wemple says.

Wemple offers some solid advice: “Caveat lector: If you heard about it in the Sunday Source’s listings, call before you go.”

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