Shortly after the police raid on the Marion County Record and the death of its 98-year-old co-publisher, Joan Meyer, most news outlets spelled her name “Joan.” Then The New York Times came along and, in an otherwise lovely tribute, spelled her name “Joann.” A lot of us decided we were wrong, and I went back and changed everything. Now it turns out that it was the Times that couldn’t spell her name properly. It is, in fact, “Joan,” though it’s pronounced “jo-ANN.”
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Teachable moment here for Reporting 101: “There are multiple spellings of “Jo-ANN.” Good reporting and/or rewriting demands the writer ask for the proper spelling of any name, even if it seems “perfectly obvious.”
https://youtu.be/MxALH_3qadg