Seven corrections darkened the lower portion of Page A2 Tuesday.
In that day’s Sports section, foreshadowing another correction to come, a line above the “HORSECOLLARED” headline in the edition I received read: “Jaguars 29, Colts 7.”
Nope. It was the Colts who won.
Everyone — even an entire newspaper, it seems — can have a bad day. This, though, was more than that. It was the most noticeable recent example of what has become a trend in the Sentinel: an uptick in errors.
In the past three months, the newspaper has corrected more than a third more errors of its own making on average than it did during the relatively placid prior five months. August, September and October have accounted, thus far, for significantly more corrections of internally generated errors than the newspaper averaged in that three-month period during the prior five years.
That includes an accounting through Friday. I’d have waited until the end of the month to raise this frightening issue, but with several days left before Halloween, and several more corrections awaiting publication, the total for October already has surpassed that of September — which was worse than August.
It’s not hard to see where this is headed or why it is happening.
When the Sentinel tightened its financial belt back in June, it lost a wealth of seasoned veterans, many of them editors. Those journalists not only wrote headlines and captions. They also scrutinized the work of reporters — correcting spelling, straightening out syntax, double-checking facts — before publication.
With fewer people to do that now, less of that important work gets done, and the result is more published errors.
Every business’ success depends on the reliability of its products or services. If their reliability declines, people are less likely to buy them. Newspapers are particularly susceptible to that phenomenon.
If readers regularly find mistakes, they have every reason to wonder about the accuracy of everything else in the publication. They have no way of knowing which parts of the newspaper have been thoroughly and carefully edited and which have not.
Corrections — regardless of how minor the error — help. They demonstrate a commitment to getting things right, even if after the fact. Nothing, though, beats front-end quality control.
Information that can’t be trusted is not less valuable; it’s worthless.
The Sentinel encountered a similar predicament at the beginning of this year. Errors in January and February, in fact, were more numerous than they have been in the current period.
The newspaper quickly brought the problem under control. That can be done again, but it will take a commitment to adequate editing resources.
The Sentinel is going through a transition period in which several elements are changing to adjust to a changing market.
In that process, it must take care not to jeopardize what gives the newspaper value to its readers: accurate and consistently reliable information.
