When you’re publishing tens of thousands of facts each day, you’re going to get some of them wrong.
You’re also likely to have some grammatical goofs such as the mistake I made in this space two weeks ago when writing about the AJC’s coverage of the March 2 fatal bus crash involving members of Ohio’s Bluffton University baseball team.
One note came in the mail without a name or return address: “Thank you for the fascinating and well-done account of behind the scenes of the Bluffton tragedy. But I wonder: Were you and all of the AJC copyreaders at home with measles when your English teachers covered the correct and incorrect uses of ‘lie’ and ‘lay’?”
In describing what AJC reporter Mike Morris saw when he arrived at the scene seconds after the crash, I wrote that some players were walking around in a daze, while others were “laying” on the ground. Later, in the column, I repeated the error.
Grammatical and style errors are the source of frequent complaints from readers. It’s my job, as public editor, to make sure errors are corrected each day.
Last year, 985 mistakes were corrected in the newspaper, compared to 1,032 in 2005. Among those 2006 errors, the largest category 392 happened at the reporter level. Incorrect information from sources contributed to 128 errors, and 125 mistakes were made at the copy editor level. Line editors were the source of 85 mistakes; clerks made 42. Designers contributed 32, and photographers made 24. Included in the remaining errors, 35 in wire stories were corrected, and freelancers accounted for 34 published corrections.
Since the AJC carries a wealth of calendar information each week, 79 errors appeared in the Thursday accessAtlanta section, where many listings appear. Surprisingly, 97 errors appeared in Page One content. Items for this page are closely scrutinized internally and by readers, who alert us to about 70 percent of our mistakes each year. This is troubling because it suggests we aren’t catching all our mistakes.
The Metro section contained the most mistakes last year with 222. Sports had 104 corrections; there were 62 in Living, 56 in the main news or A section, 44 in the daily and Sunday @issue sections, and 40 in Business. Because ajc.com content is updated frequently, errors on the Web site are fixed as soon as we learn about them. As we continue to expand online, more scrutiny is needed to catch errors before they appear on the Web site, where producers typically have minutes to edit and post material.
Three of last year’s most egregious errors occurred when we picked up news briefs about fatal accidents and a shooting that happened the previous year, and published them.
The most common mistakes are misspelled names. Last October, Mill Creek football player Lenny Brooks was honored as Player of the Week in a prominent spread in the AJC Gwinnett News section.
Unfortunately, his last name was spelled “Brook,” which put a damper on the entire package. The mistake happened when a copy editor noticed that the reporter had a different spelling for the name than what was on the team roster in the database.
Without checking with the reporter, who had Brooks’ name correct, the copy editor changed it to match the roster spelling. This is why staff members are urged to double- and triple-check facts. Public records and Web sites are sometimes incorrect.
When staffers make a mistake, we are required to submit a correction form and give an accounting of how the mistake happened. Supervisors including the AJC’s top editors get copies of the form, and a database is used to keep track of where errors appear and who makes them. Accuracy is emphasized in training sessions, and there are consequences for frequent errors. Grammatical and style errors are not corrected in print, but we do take note of them internally.
Each time a mistake is made, the AJC loses a bit of its most important commodity: credibility.
In these instances, the best thing we can do is openly acknowledge the mistake and promptly correct it. We depend on our staff, sources and readers to let us know when they see a mistake that needs correcting. Readers and sources should contact the writer, the public editor or both to report mistakes.
