(Continued...)

6. John Rockwell (7.5 percent correction rate)

Rockwell, the Times's former chief dance critic, often gets confused about names and minor details. When he wrote about the Lincoln Center Festival three times in July 2005, he never disclosed that he took part in the festival's founding. Rockwell had been at the Times for 22 years, according to the paper, before joining forces with Lincoln Center in 1994 (he rejoined the paper in 1998). Aside from that, Rockwell hasn't made many significant errors over the past few years, though in a review of a music and dance performance in 2005, he wrote that one performer wore "sensible shoes." Actually, he was barefoot.



7. Roberta Smith (6.5 percent correction rate)

Smith, an art critic, had a respectable correction average, but she also had a high number of corrections. How? She wrote a lot of stories, including scads of listings and blurbs. Her slip-ups included stating the High Renaissance happened in the late 1500s and early 1600s (a century too late), attributing a work in a Harlem exhibit to the wrong artist, and identifying chocolate frosting used in a piece as ketchup. She made six errors in a story about Pixar in 2005, including misidentifying a character in The Incredibles, then crediting that character to the wrong actor, not to mention claiming creative chief John Lasseter founded Pixar, when in fact Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull started it. In a story about art galleries' ever-changing role in the art world before last year's Whitney Biennial, she mistakenly said one artist's work had been accepted when it had been rejected and left out another artist who had actually been invited. And when she announced the opening of the Biennial in February, she got the day wrong. Most recently, Smith wrote that a Peruvian statue of the baby Jesus showed him holding half of a heart in his left hand. It was half of an avocado.

8. John Markoff (9.2 percent correction rate)

Markoff, who reports on computers, software, and the Silicon Valley tech industry, has a decently high boo-boo rate, but his mistakes are almost always minor, and even then, they're often so geeky as to be inaccessible to the average human. He wrote, for example, that Linus Torvalds had incorporated code from Andrew S. Tannenbaum's Minix operating system when he created the Linux kernel, the nerd Rosetta Stone. Torvalds, in fact, borrowed no Minix code ... Outraged? There were a few more-easily-
understood corrections, however, like when Markoff understated the going retail price for Windows XP (as $99 when it was $199).



9. Byron Calame (9.3 percent correction rate)

While Calame's byline showed up only 43 times in the period we examined, four of those came with corrections. Given that the Times carved out the public editor position in response to the Jayson Blair scandal, it's a tad disconcerting that he got one detail wrong when he wrote about it as the new public editor, stating that Blair's performance hadn't been evaluated when he was at the Times metro desk from 2001 to 2002. It had. It's also curious that Calame, a former Wall Street Journal editor whose kid-glove performance at the Times has been criticized in some quarters, doesn't appear to have a firm grasp on how many people subscribe to the New York Times. In 2005, he wrote that the "Sunday edition has 1.7 million paying subscribers," a number that referred to its paid circulation, which includes both newsstand sales and home delivery. The man is obviously out of control.

10. Damon Darlin (9.5 percent correction rate)

Darlin, a business reporter, didn't make what you might call serious errors. But he did make a good number of them. He calculated, for example, that you'd need to save about $1,000 per month with 7 percent monthly returns to get $500,000 in 18 years for your kid's college education. More like $1,200 with 7 percent annualized returns, idiot! In an even more egregious display of very minor mistakery, he mixed up William R. Hewlett and David Packard's roles in starting Silicon Valley and botched a description of the pioneers who invented integrated circuits. Darlin made five errors in an article about McClatchy's sale of The San Jose Mercury News, the whopper of which was a claim that Silicon Valley's tech jobs were up to pre-bubble-burst levels when, in fact, the region had only regained about 10,000 of the 178,000 jobs it lost after the dot-com bust in the late 90s. And last September, when the HP news-leak investigation scandal hit, Darlin reported that a Timesman named John Markoff (sound familiar?) was a target of the company's gumshoes. He wrote that a lawyer for AT&T disclosed that information; actually, it came from California's attorney general's office.

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