h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Nick Reynolds posted an excellent blog entry.

http://nickreynoldsatwork.wordpress.com/


For all we complain about the BBC the handover project was an amazing job which they did a really good job on.

He's a soppy get. Cracking post though.

'hundreds of Edited Guide entries'. Did he have any idea what h2g2 WAS? No I don't think so. Good bloody riddance.

Oooooooooh

So he didn't really know h2g2 that well. So what? It's not like he really had a chance to is it? Yeah, I cringed a little at that figure but because the tone of the rest of the article was so positive I thought I'd be grown up about it and let it slide.

So what if he was just talking to himself, or us. Otherwise he's giving totally the wrong impression, and it makes us look like a fan site rather than a serious writing site.

10,134 Edited and 258,327 unedited as of 16:45 this afternoon.

It is a bit of a shame he didn't really know the scope of h2g2 - I think he was involved in the how-h2g2-sits-with-the-BBC end rather than the actual pointy end of what we do and how we work.

Who knows, maybe it worked out in our favour as he didn't realise to true awesomeness of what he was 'disposing'!

I think he very much knew the "overall big picture" stuff, he gave a good account of the way the site worked, about core users and wider readers and seemed pretty clued up on stats and figures during the bid/pitch process. And he did seem to really like h2g2, so I'll happily give him the benefit of the doubt and say it's probably an error

Another possibility is that he wrote the correct numbers in his original submission to Ariel, the numbers were then reduced during editing, and he's blogged the magazine article text rather than his original copy.

Which would then make it the copy editor's fault rather than Nick's.

Am I giving him too much leeway, though?


Geggs

There's a ridiculous difference between hundreds of thousands of unedited entries and thousands, and 10,000 EGE and hundreds!

Now I wish I hadn't deleted my BBC account, otherwise I would have posted to the blog. It doesn't do credit to the Guide Team that worked there either.

If it is the editors fault- look at it this way, the BBC lost its best editors when it spun off h2g2.

As I'm pretty sure Nick Reynolds isn't an evil robot hell bent on destroying Hootoo via the medium of a single blog article that probably won't get read by that many people overall, can we possibly allow him to make a single error in an otherwise postive and complimentary article? Y'know, because not being an evil robot means he must be human and *all* humans make mistakes...

That's not to say he shouldn't be corrected, but I just don't see why it's worth getting so about.