Is anyone awake over there at the Washington Post Metro section? Doesn’t seem like it. On the front page of this morning’s Metro section there was a story about Wal-Mart’s plan to open six stores in the District of Columbia. But in the box listing the locations there was an impossible address, “801 New Jersey Ave. NE”. That’s an impossible location: New Jersey Avenue exists in the Southeast and Northwest quadrants of the city, but not in the Northeast. (Hint to Post folks: look it up on a map.) I thought that surely such an egregious error would be corrected on the web edition. But as of 9:15am this morning it wasn’t.
Then I looked more carefully at Post’s list of the locations of the six proposed Wal-Marts in a graphic accompanying the story. There are some inconsistencies: for the first four locations the quadrant is given; not so for the last two. Maybe there’s just not enough room in the graphic. The first letters of the abbreviations Ave. and Rd. are capitalized for locations 2, 3, 5 and 6, but avenue and streets do not have the first letters capitalized for locations 1 and 4. Also, for those two locations the first letters of avenue and streets are not abbreviated; for locations 2, 3, 5 and 6, the first letters of Ave. and Rd. are.
I guess no one is really hurt by this sloppiness, unless some poor soul out there is driving around in search of New Jersey Ave. NE. But it makes me wonder if anyone is editing this stuff.
