Spencer Melville
San Jose, Calif.
I just wanted to point out some misinformation reported in Thursday's paper. Of course I find several journalism mistakes each day in The Daily Universe, but this is the first time I have extra time to help out a college newspaper which doesn't even impress me as much as my high school newspaper did.
I notice incorrect information in the sports stories daily but today's story about the women's basketball team surprised me at what kind of obvious mistakes are overlooked during the editing process. When was the last time you saw the nickname of the UNC-Charlotte women's basketball team as the Tar Heels? Every sports fan should know that refers to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill team, you know, the one that Dean Smith coached forever? UNC-Charlotte's nickname is the 49ers, and they don't play in the ACC. They play in the much less prestigious Conference-USA. Last year their record was 7-20 overall and only 2-12 in Conference-USA. They are only returning three starters instead of the reported four, and they have four talented incoming freshmen. I couldn't care less about their basketball team but I do care enough to have correct information in our school newspaper. All of this information was found on the Internet with little effort. There could have been and probably were other errors in the sports stories today but this one was very obvious and glaring. I hope you spend more time on research or editing or whatever it is that seems to be overlooked every day. Would you like help in this process? I'm no journalism guru but it seems apparent that I know a heck of a lot more about sports than most of your writers. I hope to see some improvement in the future.