Corrections: Getting it right the second time…

Mistakes in newspapers are like warts. They mar the beauty of the product, which for a newspaper includes its credibility. The paper may look handsome with large color photographs on the front page, eye-catching graphics, snazzy headlines and investigative stories. But errors can spoil it — both for readers and journalists.

Accuracy, journalists know, is essential to credibility. But they also know producing a perfect newspaper is a distant goal. Even so, find a journalist who has a cavalier attitude about mistakes, and I will tell you he or she is someone whose days …

Upfront with Venus Williams…

Venus Williams won the Lipton tennis championship Sunday.

But Herald readers got to see only her back and her braids in the picture that the Sports section displayed on its front page Monday.

We received many calls from angry readers who felt that it was plain wrong to have the tournament’s winner portrayed that way. Many African-American readers called the decision racist saying that the paper would not have run a similar picture if the winner had been white, say a winning Dan Marino or Steffi Graf.

I asked myself the same question after looking …

Keynote address for “Access ’99″

By Paul McMasters
The Freedom Forum

Paul McMasters, First Amendment ombudsman for The Freedom Forum, delivered this address on March 18, 1999, at “Access ’99,” a conference sponsored by the Virginia Coalition for Open Government at Montpelier, the home of James Madison, in Orange County, Virginia.

I just hosted an all-day conference Tuesday on freedom-of-information issues at the federal level. As you probably know, there are many, many problems with access to government at the national level.

• Despite presidential orders and laws requiring the declassification of millions of documents, intelligence foot-dragging and congressional interference have greatly hampered the effort.
• Federal

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Tips for callers to get their voices heard…

A frustrated reader had a question. “Why do you list your reporters’ phone numbers if they have no intention of calling back?”

I get that call a lot.

Occasionally, I hear the Soup Nazi complaint: “Yours is the only industry I know where employees (reporters and editors) treat customers with disrespect and rudeness with no consequence. I can’t imagine running my business that way.”

More frequently: “I don’t like talking to a machine. Doesn’t anyone work at The Arizona Republic? Can I talk to a real, live human being?”

It has been a year …

How to approach a newspaper poll: With caution…

Did you see those results in The Gazette’s TEL-US Poll back in January? Sobering, to say the least.

The question that day (Jan. 10) under “Daily Notebook” in the Metro/Iowa section was: “What kind of example for American youth has President Clinton set with his misleading testimony under oath?”

The results appeared in raw numbers rather than the usual percentages: Good, 308; Average, 12; Poor, 168. (The percentages: 63 and 3 and 34.)

Did you get that? More than 6 of every 10 callers thought it was OK for the president to give misleading …

Hearing from those affected by violence…

One of the most dreaded assignments in any newsroom is to interview the family of someone who has just been killed. It is bad enough when the death is an accident. It is especially bad when the victim has been murdered.

As difficult as it is from this side of the note pad, most of us can’t imagine what it is like on the other. And that was one reason for a recent seminar involving Star-Telegram reporters, editors and photographers and people who had lost family members to violent death.

The meeting was …