My latest column is online. It’s about the private equity business, and it was inspired by the gloomy talk by private equiteer George Siguler that I wrote about last week.
I quote Siguler in the column, and I spell his name correctly. I had trouble with lots of others. Copy editors here caught me calling Blackstone boss Stephen Schwarzman “Steven,” the research firm Preqin “Prequin,” and Siguler Guff & Co. “Siguler & Guff.” That’s partly because I rushed the thing to the editors, and was going to double-check all the names post-editing. But it’s still inexcusably sloppy.
Just as I was being alerted to all these errors, a mass e-mail arrived from Josh Tyrangiel, one of the top editors here, saying that writers needed to be extra careful to get proper names right. He’s talking to me, I thought, and I looked over the column again. I Googled the name “David Rubinstein,” which took me to the Carlyle Group managing director’s bio page on Carlyle’s Website. I was relieved to see that his first name was in fact David (I had a fleeting moment of doubt). I made sure I had his title right. I debated whether to include his middle initial (“M,” just like mine). And my brain entirely failed to register that on the Carlyle site his last name was spelled “Rubenstein.”
As soon as the column went up online Thursday night, a friend who makes a habit of reading the new issue of TIME as soon as it goes live e-mailed to say that I’d spelled Rubenstein’s name wrong. (This is, by the way, the same person who caught me misspelling Pension Benefit Guaranty in this blog.) So it’s fixed online, albeit with an ominous “Correction appended April 2, 2009” in bold letters at the beginning of the piece. But the print version hitting newsstands today will spread my wrongness to millions of readers, until a correction appears in the next issue.
At least it’s better than the time (in 1988) that I wrote an article for the Advance-Register in Tulare, Calif., about the new Louis Rich turkey processing plant in town. The plant manager’s first name was Dexter. Sometime in the previous year or so I had seen Bertrand Tavernier’s wonderful movie Round Midnight, starring jazz great Dexter Gordon, and gone out and bought a cassette or two of Gordon’s music. In the article, I referred to the plant manager throughout as “Dexter Gordon.” That was not his name. His name was Dexter Bennett, and I’ve just discovered to my sadness that he died in January.
Anyway, I apologize to David Rubenstein, and I think I can promise with some confidence never to make that particular error again. I also apologize to John Rose, a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group who spent a long time on the phone educating me about the private equity business only to be bumped from my column when Rubenstein returned my call. Or was it Rubinstein?
Update: I highly recommend the “possibly related post” listed below on Submitting perfect copy. And I really do follow the advice in it most of the time. Just didn’t this week.