Monday’s headline was a god-awful mistake. But Thursday’s obituary list turned out to be a life and death situation for Erma Muntean.
The Akron Beacon Journal incurred the wrath of some readers last week with a Page A1 headline that read, “Faith in god, love of soccer enrich lives of migrants in Northeast Ohio.”
In case you didn’t notice, the “g” in God wasn’t capitalized, as it is supposed to be.
Some callers wanted to make sure I understood that proof now existed that the newspaper is godless, soulless and devoid of all morals and standards.
Turns out, it was not part of a devilish plot.
“The explanation is as simple as it is infuriating,” said Jim Kavanagh, the person in charge of the copy desk. “The copy editor who wrote the headline simply missed the shift key while typing, and the editor who double-checks didn’t catch it.”
Then on Thursday, Erma Muntean was included among the recently departed in Stark County. In the list of area deaths, it read like this:
“Muntean, Erma, 84, of Alliance. Saturday. Sharer-Stirling-Skivolocke funeral home.”
Erma survived breast cancer in 1997 and is alive and kicking up her heels on area ballroom dance floors — at age 77.
“It gave us all a funny feeling when we saw it,” she said, referring to her son, Dan Skivolocke, who owns the funeral home.
It was Erma who faxed the obit notification for Gretchen Grisez to the Beacon Journal on Wednesday and, as many people do, she included her name atop the fax. The classified advertising employee who compiles the Stark death list, which is not handled by the news department, misread the fax.
The episodes made me think about the whole issue of mistakes and accuracy.
Every day the Beacon Journal produces the equivalent of a full-length book. There are multiple checkpoints along the way, with at least three people seeing almost everything that is printed. And while there no longer are proofreaders, copy editors are trained to look for errors.
Still, silly mistakes get published. Recently, Ben Maidenburg’s name was misspelled in a story. He was the Beacon Journal’s legendary publisher and editor in the 1960s and 1970s and was active as a community leader.
Several longtime Akron residents called into question the paper’s commitment to accuracy: “If you can’t get the easy things right, how can we trust you to get anything right?”
I don’t have an appropriate answer for that. An accuracy percentage of about 99.9 isn’t good enough.
Recently, I asked readers about newspaper preferences and you were clear. You expect 100 percent accuracy and you are disappointed with anything less.
Norma Blank of Cuyahoga Falls said this in an e-mail: “When you see these errors in the BJ, I have to question the intelligence of the writer and the care they give to their product.”
Make no mistake about it, everyone here at the paper is embarrassed when any error occurs.
Editor Jan Leach cites accuracy as one of her top priorities, simply because it has such a strong and direct effect on the credibility of the newspaper.
Other readers are more forgiving of typographical mistakes, saying errors in fact have more lasting damage.
“Being the object of a factual error in reporting must be very frustrating for the average person,” said Pat Hays of Ravenna. “There is no good way for damage control and no retraction in a little box on the second page will reach all the same readers as did the original story.”
The Page A2 corrections box is not always a good repair for Page A1 damage. The correction is there simply to set the record straight.
Often the “Clarifications & Corrections” box is used to fix mistakes resulting from incorrect information supplied to the newspaper. Sometimes it’s used to clarify a situation when no mistake is actually made.
In a story last week about the fatal truck-auto accident on Interstate 76 in Norton on Jan. 25, it was reported that Jeffrey Sowash, 31, was not wearing a seat belt.
A family friend called to say the police report was wrong and that Sowash died from a ruptured spleen, an injury associated with wearing a seat belt.
“Jeffrey was the kind of person who would not start the car unless everyone in it was wearing their seat belt,” the friend said.
The Norton police confirmed that the initial report was wrong and a clarification was printed yesterday.
For the Muntean and Sowash families, it was important that friends and relatives know what actually happened.
For me, their cases put into perspective the typo in the God headline.
Still, for Kavanagh, the Beacon Journal copy desk chief and a self-proclaimed, born-again Christian, the mistake reflected badly on his department and on the newspaper. “Sometimes we learn things the hard way.”
