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The L.A. Times was forced to get its ombudsman out after readers took issue with the web version of its NBCC Awards piece. The headline read "Egan Beats Franzen," but the accompanying photo showed Jonathan Franzen; compounding the potential bias, the following lede read "The Jennifer Egan work bests Jonathan Franzen's FREEDOM," omitting the name of Egan's award-winning novel A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. The excuses given for these choices in the "reader representative"'s report are (a) Egan's book hasn't sold as well, so is positioned as an upset ("Some Dude Beats Goliath"?) and (b) the AP only had a photo "from 2006" available.

Congratulations, you just made it worse!!

I don't think anyone meant to slight Egan -- the decisions were probably made late at night, by people who had a lot of articles to turn over for the next day's paper, and did what they thought was best re. fitting a cumbersome title in and providing an eye-catching graphic. But just once it would be nice if one of these public-editor pieces came out with "Yeah, we can see how that looks sexist, and we didn't mean it, and we're really sorry." And what is the justification behind noting, after Egan's photo was swapped in, that she was "photographed in 2006"? She's alive, and she's not a kidnapping victim (or a hermit that we know of). We wouldn't know the difference.

To me, leaving A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD out of the lede is a greater sin, journalistically speaking. One glance at the headline and you'll come away with author, but not title. Think of it as, "Pres. Obama Orders Missile Strikes Against Some Nation." The information is significant.

And finally, Jonathan Franzen has an ability to insert himself into any storm, right? He had nothing to do with this, but here we are talking about him as if he were some sort of Male Literary Culture lighting rod. He should have been a Real Housewife.