Royal Mint Issues Coronation Street Coins According to the Daily Mail More media misinformation about coins and medals. These are actually medals or medallions, but do journalists or editors care about accuracy?

Here is the Article:

Royal Mint commemorates Coronation Street's 50th anniversary with special edition coins
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Last updated at 11:03 PM on 1st December 2010
The Royal Mint has for the first time immortalised soap characters into a commemorative coin.
Six special-edition medals featuring the five 'Queens' of Coronation Street have been made to mark Coronation Street's 50th anniversary.
The sixth coin features the Street's famous watering hole, The Rovers Return, with the unmistakable cobbled streets outside.
Coronation Street legends Vera Duckworth, Hilda Ogden, Bet Gilroy, Deirdre Barlow and current Rovers barmaid Becky McDonald have been joined by their on-screen husbands on a series of meticulously designed medals.
They mark five decades of the Weatherfield saga and it is the first time the Royal Mint has ever honoured a soap opera in this way.
Recently departed Jack Duckworth is reunited with his other half Vera in one design that features the warring couple in their younger days.
It comes complete with the infamous stone cladding from ‘The Old Rectory’ at number nine.
Steve and Becky McDonald pose in front of the flock wallpaper of the Rovers, while Bet Gilroy’s beehive is captured in fine detail.
Dave Knight, the Royal Mint's Director of Commemorative Coin, said: 'Every year the Royal Mint captures the likeness of statesmen and royalty around the world, but faithfully capturing the essence of ten, hugely loved television icons who, for the last 50 years have been regular visitors to millions of sitting rooms across the country, was a particular challenge.
'Coronation Street is a great, British institution and it's only fitting that the Royal Mint should commemorate its cultural significance with the first ever soap-inspired medals.'

What's Wrong?
Coins are coins, medals are not!
Although they may look similar, coins are a type of money, have a face value, and are normally legal tender in their country of origin.
Medals and medallions are simply metal discs which superficially look like coins.
Including photograph captions, and the headline, five time the article refers to the medallions as coins, and three times it refers to them as medals. At the very best, this is confusing.

Why Be Pedantic?
Some people might think we are being slightly pedantic about this, but we know there is an important difference, and newspapers should be ashamed of writing such ill-informed and misleading dribble.
One thing that worries us is that if papers make so many mistakes and write such inaccurate stuff about coins, then how much reliance can we place on the rest of what we read in our newspapers?
We have a signed copy of a book, Spink's Catalogue of British Commemorative Medals, by Daniel Fearon. In it he argues that it is incorrect to call medals medallions. While we follow his argument, and are basically in agreement, we happen to think that it is useful to be able to differentiate quickly between the sort of medals which are awarded for military service and other achievements, compared with the commemorative variety. Within our company, we use the word medallion to denote metallic discs which commemorate things, or which are issued to sell to collectors perhaps for their artistic merits, and use the word medal to denote war and service medals.
While this arrangement may not be perfect, we believe it is a useful convention. Language is flexible enough to evolve, and it only exists to help communication.
We would not accuse Daniel of being pedantic, and we hope he would accept our argument for the more flexible use of the two terms.
We would, and do, however accuse the Daily Mail of sloppy, lazy, and inaccurate use of words, which serves to misinform rather than inform their readers. We do not think we are being pedantic.
Calling a medallion a coin because they are both circular objects made of metal is like calling the Daily Mail a magazine or a toilet roll, just because they all consist of rectangular sheets of paper.
Come to think of it...