A 27-Million Visitor Count Mistake

Here we go again. It's another egregious error on the part of The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. This time, the boner appeared yesterday in Anthony Curtis' "Las Vegas Advisor" column that runs every Sunday in the local rag.

When I saw the headline, it tickled my interest. "A record 15 million" is unusual in itself, since I know a helluva lot more tourists hit Sin City (aka Las Vegas) annually.

The true figure emerges early in the first paragraph. Curtis actually said "42 million." But somehow, the Star-Advertiser headline writer must have had "2015" in his/her mind and keyed in "15" instead of the correct "42."

(Click on the picture to enlarge it.)

The thing is, apparently, nobody proofed the page before it hit the presses.

When I was editor of a weekly newspaper in Los Angeles back in the late '60s-early '70s, I fired a couple of people for errors like this. We were a small paper, but we had high standards. The Star-Advertiser is a much larger daily paper than we were, but apparently, its standards leave much to be desired.

Shame, shame!