The number of readers who write to the ombudsman complaining about Portuguese mistakes in Folha has increased. Last year, there were 65 such messages. This year, through Friday, there were 166. The complaints mainly pointed out errors of agreement, crasis (contraction of two vowels into one), and spelling. “The number of mistakes in Portuguese in Folha’s stories is incredible,” reader Dirce Pranzetti wrote in November. “I already got used to so many vulgarisms, but … it was difficult to accept one accent in place of another.”
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The most mistakes are made in newspaper editorials; they have smaller staffs and more complicated deadlines
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The official numbers confirm that the newspaper does badly in this area. In the second half of this year, which has not yet ended, Folha committed a daily average of 0.8 mistakes per column of text, almost five mistakes per page, a total of approximately 150 mistakes per day.
This number includes errors in Portuguese, typographical mistakes and standardization. Those involving standardization relate to style rules made by Folha itself. One example: the newspaper uses Arabic numerals, and not Roman, in the names of royalty and popes. If the name of the new pope comes out in Roman numerals, that is considered a mistake.
The majority of mistakes are in Portuguese. Spelling mistakes, which shot up shortly after closing the editing desk in 1984, are less common today due to spell check software used in the newsroom.
Historic
Before going into the numbers, here is a brief history.
Folha began to take daily control of Portuguese mistakes at the beginning of the 1980s, before it started Project Folha (1984) which defined its journalism as critical, modern, pluralistic and nonpartisan.
The newspaper was the first Brazilian news organization to computerize, in 1983. On Feb. 9, 1984, it ended copy editing, where all stories went before being published. With computerization, all the newsrooms stopped copy editing.
Here is some information about newspapers: Folha committed on average 25 mistakes per day in Portuguese, typographical errors and standardization until proofreading ended. This number jumped in the following days to 300 per edition, until it stabilized at about 100. Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva, in his book “1000 Days” (Cultural Trajectory Publishing, 1988), pointed out a daily average of 32 “serious grammatical errors” in February 1987.
With the new editorial project in 1984, the daily survey of errors began to circulate in the newsroom in a way that resembled a criminal rap sheet, with identification of mistakes and their authors. It was incorporated in various other measures that have as their objective following journalistic performance in the newsroom and allowing an evaluation of progress. As a result of mapping daily mistakes, the newspaper began to define goals to be reached and created recycling programs with Portuguese classes.
This system stayed active for two decades. In 1996, the newspaper took a step forward to create a quality program, responsible not only for the daily survey but also to define strategies to attack the most frequent mistakes and help managers, editors and reporters with language difficulties.
This pioneer program underwent a big change in July of last year, when the newspaper, for financial reasons, cut dozens of staff members in the newsroom and, among other drastic measures, incorporated the quality program for training in the newsroom and renamed it the department of training and quality.
The quality program was then reduced from 24 to six staff members, including a Portuguese teacher, and changed the methodology for counting mistakes. The newspaper kept its courses in Portuguese (there were four this year), but suspended the detailed survey of types of mistakes committed, which impeded planning a combat strategy.
Staff reductions, however, did not change the final count of mistakes. The numbers for 2004 and 2005 could be compared with historic numbers at the newspaper and are not good. Benedito Carlos de Almeida, a survivor from the editing staff and quality program who has been at the newspaper since 1968, asserts that the most common mistakes are punctuation, agreement and relationship between words.
Mistakes
The newspaper had a daily average of 0.62 per column in 2003, almost four mistakes per page. At the start of 2004, the quality program defined an acceptable goal of up to 0.52 daily mistakes per column of text. The first half of the year was 0.62, an average equal to 2003. In July, Folha reduced staff. By the end of the year, the average in the second half was 0.65 mistakes per column.
Facing difficulties caused by the cuts and due to a reduction in the quality team, the newspaper suspended its definition of goals for 2005. The mistakes continue to increase.
In January, the daily average jumped to 0.82 (nearly five errors per page) and the first half ended with an average of 0.71. In July and August, this rate was 0.78, in September, it jumped to 0.84 and in October, it was 0.83. In November, it fell to 0.76 (-9ompared to October), but even then it is a very high rate.
The greatest number of errors occur in the newspaper editorials. They have smaller staffs and more complicated deadlines, which increase the possibility of mistakes.
The national, world and sports sections had a daily average, in the second half of the year not counting December, of approximately one mistake per column of text, or six mistakes per page.
Even on the front page, the newspaper’s main showcase, there is a relatively high rate: 0.27 mistakes in November and 0.25 in the half year.
Attention
And what does Folha think of the problem? I got the following from the newspaper:
“The managing editor is paying attention to an increase in the number of mistakes in the newspaper and remembers that the controls Folha implements are probably unique in Brazil. Folha has a team, even though slim, dedicated only to quantifying mistakes in the newspaper, a Portuguese teacher who gives daily assistance to journalists and produces memoranda commenting on mistakes that day, as well as having courses for journalists every year on grammar and style,” asserted Suzana Singer, managing editor for editing.
I am certain that the newspaper is concerned. The control of errors in Portuguese was always a priority at Folha. But control is only a tool. The difficulty is confronting a problem of this size with a small overworked staff and limited budgets. The newspaper needs to return urgently to this stance. The only way I see is to return to investing in editing.
Does Folha make more mistakes than its competitors? I don’t have data for the Rio daily “O Globo” or “O Estado de So Paulo” to compare. Studies conducted at other times show that Folha had a smaller rate of mistakes, but these are old studies. What is important, however, is that the newspaper makes a lot of mistakes and that the number of mistakes affects the quality of journalism that intends to be modern. And nothing is more modern than a story in good Portuguese.
Translation by John Wright
