Correcting Errors

At least somebody's on the ball at The New York Times--sort of. As I type, this picture is on the The Times's home page. It's an illustration for this blog entry about an appearance Barack Obama made at Martin Luther King's former pulpit, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. After he spoke, he laid a wreath at King's tomb, on the grounds of the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site. Although it's since been changed (actually, it was changed between when I started writing this post and now), the original caption identified the woman accompanying him as Coretta Scott King. I wondered why they didn't identify the picture as a file photo, especially since it seemed to imply that it had been taken today.

Well, it turns out I'm not the only one to notice the discrepancy. Apparently someone who actually works at the paper--possibly recalling this obituary from almost two years ago--realized that if that photo was taken today, then that wasn't Mrs. King (although I'll admit that, from a distance, the now unidentified woman does look something like her). I did a bit of quick research and found this photo of the tomb, which now includes Mrs. King. That matches the tomb Obama is visiting, which implies this is indeed a new photo. The caption was changed to read that Obama was placing a wreath at "tomb of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King." As I mentioned above, that change came after I'd already started writing this post, which was going to note another in what's becoming a series of print media missteps. Instead, it just seems to be an online error quickly corrected. Even though it's on the front of the Web site, I suspect it was never intended to get into the paper's print edition.