SwimNews.com Incurs the Wrath of SwimWatch

By Jane

Every now and then, you'll see some typos on SwimWatch. We'll have written "and" instead of "an" or "tow" instead of "two", but we try very hard to eliminate errors from our work before it's uploaded, and if we find a mistake after a post is live, we take the time to correct it.

This said, I find it very frustrating to read article after article where mistakes are just as common as commas. Take the sixth paragraph of this SwimNews article by Craig Lord:

Meantime, it took a 4:06.89 to get into the final with Manaudou but behyond her and her cao, the most striking thing about the heats was the effect the Olympic and world champion is having on French women's middle-distance.

Now, perhaps Lord will notice these mistakes and correct them, but I've noticed this kind of rushed, unedited work appear on SwimNews before. Often, the mistakes are never fixed. I know what it's like to hurry through a blog post or article, publishing a piece that I'm passionate about quickly because I'm excited to see it hit the web.

When reading Lord's pieces, however, I often get the sense that he is writing frantically, speeding through a subject on which he has a strong opinion. I may be wrong, but I do not believe that Lord reads his work before he sends it to his website, which happens to be one of the oldest and most popular swimming news sites around.

SwimWatch doesn't pretend to be objective; however, SwimNews does. It is pitched as a journalistic venture, but nearly all of the posts are written by Lord and appear to be heavily influenced by his own prejudices and beliefs. For example, I get the distinct impression that Lord does not have much time for short-course swimming (many good short-course results are followed by reasons why the swimmer in question will now do well long-course). He has even less time for the American collegiate scene (the 2006 Women's NCAA champs, featuring the likes of Mary DeScenza, Hayley Peirsol and Kara Lynn Joyce) garnered only results lists on SwimNews, while the coinciding Commonwealth Games were given over thirty entries.

I was at those NCAA championships, and I promise you that overall depth and standard of swimming was as high or higher in Athens, Georgia than it was in Melbourne, Australia that week. Yes, the Commonwealth Games had some amazing performances from people like Leisel Jones, but a competition like NCAAs deserved more than the three entries that it was afforded.

I still visit SwimNews regularly, as Lord has some great connections and writes about some interesting topics. However, I'd never go as far as to call SwimNews the web's leading swimming site. To achieve that goal, the editorial staff needs to edit its work more carefully, and suspend their subjectivity far more than they do right now.