Like most people, I am inundated with emails from Vice Presidents of banks in Nigeria.
They tell me that I have been specially selected to help move $58 million from an account in Nigeria (generally one belonging to someone with no relatives who died recently in a plane crash). If I can help in moving the money, I will receive half of it.
These are pretty good offers.
The thing that amazes me is that 1) there seem to be an awful lot of plane crashes in Nigeria. and 2) there is enough money rolling around dead bank accounts in Lagos to pay off the US national debt. The immorality of the senior banking staff of Nigeria doesn’t amaze me. Bankers are bankers.
These email solicitations are generally rife with basic grammatical errors, so I feel it my duty to write back to the bank VP and correct them. (How one gets to be the Vice President of a bank without being able to write basic English does not say much for the Nigerian public eduction system). I am currently in correspondence with a Mr. Matthew Nellor, who apparently runs the “European Union and United Nation [sic] Money Laundering Oversight Dept.” I am having a great time correcting his errors. I keep saying “please correct and resend”, and remarkably, he does.
I was, however, astonished to find even worse basic English grammar in the Secaucus New Jersey News, a burgeoning hyperlocal website.
Here’s an out-take from their report on Steve Jobs’ leaving the CEO post at Apple:
“The Wall Street and several reports said that the health condition of Steve Jobs is similar to how the company’s performance is doing lately. For years, the share prices of Apple have fluctuated. But Steve Jobs has lifted Apple in the past years. Google chairman Eric Shmidt said in his speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival on Friday that Steve Jobs had an eye of an artist and a definition of what great engineering is.”
What?
By ‘The Wall Street’, I assume they mean The Wall Street Journal, but the rest is simply idiotic.
” The market has faith in the company’s changes of the new set-up. Further, there are surrounding support from the competitive team of senior managers all over the world.”
It’s pretty unbelievable. But in case you didn’t get the point of the ‘article’, they end every article with a ‘wrap up’ paragraph:
“In this article you learned that Steve Jobs, former chief executive of Apple Inc. is the company’s giant mogul. Steve Jobs has produced many innovations which dominates the market today. Through Steve Jobs, Apple’s success has been illustrated with indispensable hyper-designed and game-changing gadgets that changed the lives of consumers.”
If I thought the Nigerian public educational system was failing, New Jersey’s is already in the toilet.
Is this what NJ schools are cranking out?
Probably not.
More likely the content (And read the whole website, if you can manage to get through it. This is only a tiny example. There are worse.) is either computer generated or it is the product of Demand Media – a text based sweat shop that cranks out copy that no one reads.
I cannot understand how the people who are launching Secaucus New Jersey News can possibly put this kind of drivel up and put their names on it, but they do.
They say it right there on the site:
“Our editorial team is made up of a very diverse group of individuals. However, they all make the same effort to make sure that their information is recent and correct, no matter the subject that they are writing on. Each one of us is dedicated to making sure our information is presented accurately. There isn’t a single article here that wasn’t reviewed before it was posted on the site.”
So there you have it.
Now, what does this have to do with video?
A lot of people are moving into the ‘hyperlocal’ video space.
It has the potential to be a very powerful market.
In the UK we are deep in discussions about launching 65 hyperlocal news stations across the country. The content for these sites/stations is going to be produced locally.
I cannot over-emphasize the importance of perfection in the product.
When we run the bootcamps, we always start by saying: ‘we only demand one thing – perfection’.
Just because the content is being created by ‘average people’ as opposed to ‘professionals’, there is no excuse for mediocrity.
Or sloppiness.
Or, in the case of The Secaucus New Jersey News, pure illiteracy.
And, because I can’t resist, this just in from The Secaucus New Jersey News:
“The storm resulted to six fatalities in New York. Three people died in Vermont and another was reported missing. Â Senator Patrick Leahy and the governor surveyed some of the most devastated communities aboard a helicopter on Monday.”
