Will the real Jane Kim please stand up? Well, first, somebody at the San Francisco Business Times needs some help telling their Jane Kims apart. They recently published an article about San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, but the individual in the accompanying photo was not Jane Kim.
Well, it was a person also named Jane Kim. This Jane Kim is Vice President of Revenue at CircleCI, and pretty much looks nothing like the Jane Kim who serves San Francisco's District 6 on the Board of Supervisors. A totally different Asian American woman named Jane Kim, which any competent photo editor should figure out.
Supervisor Jane Kim called out the gaffe on Twitter:
Really?? @SFBusinessTimes pic.twitter.com/BRTZ7Jk6wk
— Jane Kim (@JaneKim) June 8, 2017
So yeah, somebody got it wrong. It happens. But it seems to happen with way more frequency when the subjects are Asian. We can debate if the editors responsible for these mixups do indeed have some trouble telling Asians apart. Here, the San Francisco Business Times makes the case that they simply didn't care.
Supervisor Jane Kim says she wasn't really upset about the mistake. But then her aide pointed out the mistake via email to digital producer Riley McDermid, who simply said they'd be "happy to swap" the photo. No apology. They were also rather insistent that the photo they used was correctly labeled "Jane Kim," as if that justified the mistake. This did not sit well with Supervisor Jane Kim either.
I wasn't even upset until we got their email in response to our polite correction. No apology. "Take a look?" "Happy to swap out?" pic.twitter.com/l3YrFo6LIy
— Jane Kim (@JaneKim) June 8, 2017
Subsequent tweets did not help clarify the situation:
Actually, the rest of the email read: The reason she was tagged Jane Kim is because she IS named Jane Kim, she is VP of Revenue at CircleCI https://t.co/d5NdWl40jn
— SF Business Times (@SFBusinessTimes) June 8, 2017
The rest of the email read: No, no, the reason she was tagged Jane Kim is because she IS named Jane Kim, she is VP of Revenue at CircleCI.
— SF Business Times (@SFBusinessTimes) June 8, 2017
Yeah, no shit. Nobody is disputing that both individuals are named Jane Kim. Is it difficult to grasp that more than one person in human existence might be named "Jane Kim"? Hell, I currently have four different Jane Kims in my own address book. Perhaps the task required a little more diligence to come up with the right photo.
The situation was eventually resolved when Patrick Chu, Editor in Chief of the San Francisco Business Times, called Supervisor Jane Kim to personally apologize about the mistake and the response.
.@SFBusinessTimes Editor In Chief Patrick Chu called to personally apologize for the mistake + initial response. Thank you.
— Jane Kim (@JaneKim) June 8, 2017
Anyway, that happened.
