Seriously, journalists?

After my recent post about journalism, I was surprised to read this. It was made worse by the Daily Mail (of course). The Mail’s article says:

But now, to the horror of the purists, the game’s makers are throwing out the old rule book and allowing proper nouns.

Worse still, not only will the names of places, trademarks and people be permissible, but even words spelled backwards or placed unconnected to other pieces.

Now, it seems that actually this is what’s actually going on:

Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble in England, is going to release a completely new version of the game there called Scrabble Trickster, in which anything goes, including the use of proper nouns, spelling words backwards, stealing letters, and so on.

No ‘throwing out the old rule book’ after all then.

Thanks to CNET for sorting out the problem. Shame on the BBC for shocking reporting - it relegates the the true story almost to the end of the article:

[Mattel] will continue to sell a board with the original rules.