LETTER TO NEW YORK TIMES:
Dara Khosrowshahi had a problem. His name was Travis Kalanick.
This is your first sentence of your front page story, which I read in the print version of your international edition.
Can't you see the grammatical problem with this sentence?
We can identify the problem with a Q & A:
Question: The name of what was "Travis Kalanick"? Answer: the problem.
Therefore, the sentence should be:
Dara Khosrowshahi had a problem. Its name was Travis Kalanick.
This would avoid confusion. I had to read it over several times. I wondered if a fellow called Dara …had perhaps changed his name to Travis … (I'd heard of Kalanick, but wasn't sure I'd heard of Khosrowshahi).
This is quite a serious grammatical error in your very first sentence which makes up the whole of the first para.
And while the headline of this online version (above) helps a bit, the headline in the print version does not: "Problem for Uber's IPO: The founder". No clue there to the Dara/Travis travesty.
In short, you didn't bury the lede. You burned it.
Peter Forsythe
Hong Kong
93080799
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The C.E.O. wants to prove that the start-up has evolved past a raucous, and profligate, tech-bro culture. But Uber's past is simply not that far gone.
