Yesterday, our local CNN Headline News radio station (KLIV 1590) ran a puff piece on the CEO of Harper-Collins. I think it was the CEO. She sounded like a sharp person, but I can’t manage to even verify her name on the badly-designed H-C website. In it, they claimed that H-C is the first publisher to make excerpts of their books available on-line. They rolled out that “innovative” idea this year. Bzzzt. Wrong.

OK, accepting the qualifier “publisher” does rule out relative unknowns like Amazon (search inside this book) and Google’s book search. Google and Amazon aren’t publishers. And “excerpt” accidentally rules out the Baen Free Library which publishes entire books. But it is still wrong.

Every heard of the publisher O’Reilly? The reporter would have, if they’d ever even walked into the cube of anyone who keeps cnn.com running. O’Reilly has published book chapters for many years. Five years, seven, who knows? Heck, they’ve been doing it long enough to move past that stuff to a customizable on-line textbook publishing system for universities.

And I can’t even link to the CNN HN story so I can diss it specifically, because it doesn’t seem to exist on their website. Bleah.

I titled this “more bad reporting” because the worst science reporting I’ve ever heard was on CNN Headline News. I’ll write that up later.