While errors may jar with us, we all make mistakes, as the irony of the typo in the thread heading shows.
In a website running to several hundred pages, errors are bound to have crept in.
If ever I have cause to complain about something, I discover and write to the person likely to have the most power to get the issue fixed soonest.
It’s unclear why Jones sent the dossier to Hilary McGrady other than that she is Director General. As he had already spent 400 hours (the equivalent of 50 days of full time work) scouring the website, he presumably saw the page which lists senior personnel and their responsibilities. He would have learned that Celia Richardson, Director of Communications and Fundraising “ is responsible for the Trust’s web and digital services”.
One can imagine the chain of events. The dossier arrives on the desk of Grady who asks her secretary to pass it to Richardson who then tasks the staff responsible for web content with correcting the errors. It will take time, human resources and money. Creating and editing webpages requires a very different skill set to proofreading.
We don’t know the tone of any covering letter Jones wrote to accompany to the dossier but it may not have been polite. Nevertheless it should have been acknowledged. Maybe everybody was assuming someone else (or someone else’s secretary) had done it.
Mr Jones took umbrage that his unasked for work wasn’t acknowledged and accorded the importance and priority he thought it deserved so fired off a rude email including a jibe about Grady’s Irish ethnicity.
Richardson (not McGrady) has responded to the DT on X writing:
"Case study for journalism students showing how papers mislead people. Based on a fallacy known as ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ meaning ‘after this therefore because of this’, it’s used to imply that sequential events are causal without directly claiming it."
As Esmay says, I suspect Mr Jones has “history” with the NT and this may have been the last straw.
He wasn’t sacked. He had a fit of pique and resigned.
Although it is claimed that Jones found “thousands” of errors on the website, the most the DT journalist Albert Tait can do is point out that web information for visiting one site has the word “toliets” instead of toilets, in another “permanant” instead of permanent and that artist Lucy Madox-Brown’s name has been typed as Maddox. Irritating for the typo pedant but hardly hanging offences.
Tait is junior, worked on local papers from 2022 until 2024 when he got his break with the DT. He hustles for human interest stories. I’m betting Jones went to the paper.
