Errors & Omissions: Headlines are for readers, not media-obsessed writers

Plus casual sexism and a couple of unconventional usages from this week's Independent

It is terribly easy to get too close to the story and assume knowledge on the part of the reader that most people don’t have. That happened to the writer of this headline, which appeared above a news report on Thursday: “Newsnight Savile journalists attack ‘anti-victim’ Panorama.”

What is a Newsnight Savile journalist? Well, it turns out that it is a journalist who worked on Newsnight reports about Jimmy Savile’s years of sex abuse that were pulled from broadcast in 2011. Those events may be etched indelibly on the minds of all media reporters, but I submit that most readers will have been pretty hazy about them, until they were reminded by a paragraph halfway down the story.

A headline needs to be understood by people who have not yet read the story.

• The following picture caption appeared on a business page on Tuesday: “Michael Froman (centre), the US trade representative, is flanked by international counterparts during the closing press conference in Atlanta, Georgia.”

Jon Summers has written in to point out that the photograph depicts a row of eight men in grey suits. How can anybody be said to be at the centre of an even number?

Mr Froman’s face does actually appear an equal distance from each side of the picture, so he is in the centre in a geometric sense, but Mr Summers still has a point.

• A science story published on Tuesday quoted Professor Andrew Dzurak, of the University of New South Wales: “If quantum computers are to become a reality, the ability to conduct one- and two-qubit calculations are essential.”

Professor Dzurak is not a professor of English grammar, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t have done him a small favour by correcting that second “are” to “is”.

• I am grateful to Anthony Ingleton for pointing out an example of casual sexism. A television review published on Thursday informed us that the winner of The Great British Bake Off was “a 30-year-old mum-of-three from Leeds”. The two other contestants in the final were both men. Needless to say, they were not defined by the number of their children. And why “mum” rather than “mother”?

• This is from a book review published on Monday: “But their relationship is volatile. When they try to wed at Guildford Registry Office, the registrar takes one look at her mascara-and-tear-stained face and sends them home to think about it.”

When I was learning to be a reporter back in the 1970s, one of the first things they dinned into you was that the place where they register births, marriages and deaths is called a register office, not a registry office. Forty years on, nobody seems to have taken any notice.

Incidentally, another thing they dinned into us was that the people attending the annual conference of the Conservative Party are not delegates but representatives. Another unlearnt lesson, if our coverage this week is anything to go by.