Mea Culpa

We insist that advertisers in Stereophile not quote from a review in the same issue, that they cannot use a quote from the fact-checking preprint they are sent until the following issue. However, the ad from Audio Revelation and On a Higher Note on p.100 of the May 2011 issue contains a quote from Michael Fremer's review of the Brinkman Bardo turntable on p.111. :-(

The editorial office is on New York, the ad production office in El Segundo, CA and we don't see the content of ads until the final review, which is the last step before that issue goes on press. In this case, the submission of this ad was so late that we didn't see it even then. So while we knew the identity of the advertiser and could ensure that the ad didn't appear near Mikey's review, we were not aware that the ad quoted from that review.

Apologies for this mishap.

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

April 30, 2011 - 6:40pm

deckeda

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Last seen: 9 months 2 weeks ago

Joined: Feb 1 2006 - 7:41pm

I don't know

... what your production workflow is, but this strikes me as a solvable problem that shouldn't require initial human checking. What's the prepress software? Indesign or some other Adobe? Should be scriptable, or your production database is.

Something like a script that compares each page against all others and then moves onto the next page. Ad and editorial location differences shouldn't matter. The script would look for the occurrence of a string of words that is user-definable. For example, tell it to look for a matching string of at least 4 words and fine tune from there. Any hits trigger an email notification.

On the other hand, perhaps this is so rarely a problem (i.e. manufactures don't break the rules) that it's not worth pursuing.

May 1, 2011 - 9:14am

RGibran

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Joined: Oct 11 2005 - 5:50pm

Someone in CA knew

John Atkinson wrote:

So while we knew the identity of the advertiser and could ensure that the ad didn't appear near Mikey's review, we were not aware that the ad quoted from that review.

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

Along comes Brinkman at the eleventh hour, who rarely if ever advertises in the mag. with a full page insertion that quotes Mickey, but again, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing? John, please, stop with the insults already!

I don't think anyone cares, I surely don't. And anyway, someone would have to had actually read the review of the 10K vinyl spinner to put 2 and 2 together! :-)

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