Photo: Paul Little

So I was reading the Metro, something I normally do only for the sudoku, but which I was checking in this case to see if there were any clues to the identity of Jeffery’s mystery VIP.

I came across a nice itemlet in the Metro’s tidbit header on page 4, saying that Vancouver councillor Ray Louie will be the honorary Race Chair at this year’s Tour de Gastown on July 19.

That’s nice. The Tour de Gastown is a great bicycle race, and routinely attracts the best pros racing in North America. Okay, that’s like talking about a hockey tournament featuring the best teams in the European leagues, but they’re still plenty fast.

So hoorah for a little publicity for a fun (and did I mention free to attend?) event in Gastown. But the blurb describes the race as “the 1.2-kilometre Tour de Gastown.”

That is akin to describing a certain auto race in Indiana as the “Indy 2.5″. 1.2 kilometres is the length of one lap. The women’s race will do 30 laps, and take about 55 minutes. The men’s race will run for 50 laps, and take about 85 minutes.

This is a classic press-release-based-news error: somewhere along the line (probably at the paper itself) a bit of copy was rewritten by someone who had little or no knowledge of the subject at hand, and thus didn’t realize they had made the event 1/50th its actual distance. It’s not just bicycle races this happens to. Much more worryingly, this is emblematic of the kind of errors that crop into all sorts of news reports in all sorts of fields.

Bloggery is both better and worse at causing similar lack-of-knowledge errors. On one hand, smart bloggers tend to write what they know, since there’s no real pressure to write what you don’t know (nobody would notice if the Metblog was three quarters of a page short of content this week; but that same content hole would look rather odd in the middle of your paper). On the other hand, there are a lot of stupid, overreaching bloggers.

Not here, of course. Us superbly professional Metrobloggers keep the ignorant overreaching for our personal sites.

The Metro publishes its daily paper online in PDF format: you can see the error at the top of page four.

They also archive old issues: there’s no links that I can see on their website, but change the date in the URL, and get an older issue. It goes back to November 15, 2005.