Message to Andres Oppenheimer: Work Harder!

OK, now this is funny. In a Herald correction this morning, the newspaper admitted the first paragraph of Andres Oppeneheimer's column "was inadvertently picked up from a previous column."

What they actually "picked up" was the headline of the column from three days before: "One sure bet: Venezuela's condition will worsen." And funny thing, it worked just fine with the Sunday column, which addressed the question of whether Hugo Chávez's recent victor in a referendum to extend his term was part of a trend.

Of course, the Herald doesn't make old stories available online, so you actually had to pay or dig up your old paper copy to figure this out. I did. Most readers won't.

There's a good reason this happened. And it's not incompetence of some layout guy. Oppenheimer quoted one expert in Sunday's column, which was otherwise his so-called expert blather about Latin American affairs.

Note to Andres: Good columns involve reporting, not grandstanding. If you don't want your work to sound the same every week, speak to a few more sources and interview real, live human beings rather than experts.