Forbes.com offers a working example

Wednesday, Forbes.com posted a near-perfect example of the difference between local news and remote, national, mega-news. They posted Matt Woolsey's Home of the Week, a $6.7 million estate on 20 acres, apparently in Santa Clara County. It's not clear where the home of the week is because the headline says Los Altos, but the article says Los Gatos. I live in Los Gatos, and the photo looks like Los Altos to me.

I pointed out the error in an e-mail to Forbes yesterday, they haven't fixed it, so I think they're fair game. (I have had my suggested corrections implemented by several national news sites; Forbes is just lame.) The trouble is, Mr. Woolsey's text describes Los Gatos--he mentions the zip code, the proximity to the redwoods and the ocean, and the Spanish translation of the name. The url is http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/20/los-gatos-home-lifestyle-real-estate-home-of-the-week.html--the name Los Gatos is embedded in the url. How embarrassing if the home is really somewhere else, which I suspect it is, since I wrote a book on Los Gatos architecture and the home doesn't look familiar.

From Wikipedia, we learn that Mr. Woolsey is 28 and was born in San Francisco. He writes for Forbes (limiting himself to real estate, lifestyle, labor, baseball, transportation, and small business) but he has also appeared on CNN, CNBC, NPR, Fox News and others.

Mr. Woolsey is on the Steve Lopez track--journalists who get so big they can't respond to an e-mail and who don't stay in one place long enough to understand what they're talking about. At least Lopez still only covers Los Angeles. Woolsey is trying to cover six desks nationally.

I'm whining about this because I believe the future needs journalists, but that they must be embedded in their beat. This shoddy "Home of the Week" nonsense only works in national printed media. On the web, his story about California real estate that does such a great job filling space between Breitling ads in Forbes in Manhattan instantly reaches a guy who wrote a book about architecture in Los Gatos and he's busted.

The web keeps journalists--anyone who tries to tell the rest of us how it is--honest. I've written many wrong things in thousands of Los Gatos stories, but I corrected them as soon as I was told they were wrong. When the facts were in dispute, reader's comments presented alternative viewpoints. The articles are part of the archival record, and because they were corrected and responded to, the archives are more valuable. I'm guessing Matt Woolsey and Forbes don't think that way with respect to left-coast "Home of the Week" fluff.

UPDATE: It took my wife, Peggy, five minutes to determine that the house is in Los Gatos, after all. It's on the hillside west of Highway 17, just south of Wood Rd. She found it on realtor Michael Nevis' web page. This means that the only correction Forbes needs to make is to the headline. Oh, and the "gated community" comment has to go unless two or three homes sharing a gate qualifies as a gated community.

FURTHER UPDATE: 9/22/09 It's been 3 months. The article is still online and the headline still says Los Altos.