help wanted: fact checking

CNN.com – Color TV hits 50th anniversary – Mar 24, 2004:

Doreen Golanoski remembers being a little girl when her family’s television set delivered something new and amazing to her eyes — a burst of color on the screen. Finally, she could see “The Jetsons” in vivid greens, blues, reds.

CNN.com – Jane Jetson voice Penny Singleton dead – Nov. 14, 2003:

The show ran in prime time for just one season, 1962-63, but has been widely seen in reruns.

I don’t fault the person interviewed: she was recollecting her childhood memories. But it didn’t seem right that the Jetsons were of the pre-Sputnik era, and ironically, the right information was on the same website (as well as a host of others).

Now, back in the day, it was a big gripe in the newsroom that the editorial staff had no tools for story research or to locate background for updated stories: I wonder, if they had it, would they use it?

We even talked to Google (Sergey Brin was interested in something that may have been a precursor to the Google Appliance) about some kind of indexing tool. The challenge was that there was some material that couldn’t be made available in public-facing search results, so some segregation of collections or repositories was required.

But this example draws on publicly accessible information.

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