The Star published 590 corrections in 2003, down from 598 in 2002. The number is significantly down from 2001, when we had 631.
The downward trend is a good sign, but it’s nothing to boast about. That averages to between one and two corrections a day.
Accuracy is the most important requirement for newspapers. It has to be. If the information you read is not overwhelmingly correct, readers will have no reason to pick up the paper (unless you get your “news” from the tabloids for their entertainment value).
Accuracy has been directly linked to credibility, i.e., if you don’t believe what you are reading is accurate, then you lose faith in the paper’s ability to present the news. And it doesn’t begin with complex stories, either. It begins with something as simple as a name.
A brief scan of the corrections The Star published last year yields dozens of names spelled incorrectly. A dropped “s”; a transposed “ie”; a silent “e” – it doesn’t seem like much, but it can mean so much to the owner of the name.
Los Angeles Times media writer David Shaw recently wrote about the importance of accuracy. As a cub reporter, Shaw made a mistake in a story. His editor lectured him, but Shaw rationalized that it wasn’t “that big a mistake.”
“Uh-oh,” he wrote. “Tom – a large, angry bear of a man – grabbed me by my left ear, dragged me into his office, flung me into a chair…
“`Any mistake is a big mistake – especially to the person you’re writing about,’ he said. `You never know when a story you write will be the only time that person’s name or his organization’s name or his family’s name ever appears in any newspaper…’”
Shaw wrote that he has never forgotten that lesson.
Just about every journalist, myself included, has a story to tell about making mistakes as a young reporter. For me, it was mixing up the difference between drinking water systems and waste water systems in a city council story. Water is water, right? Absolutely not.
Star Editor Mark Zieman remembers when he was an intern at The Kansas City Star: “When I was an intern here, you could only make three mistakes before you got fired,” he said. Zieman was two for three with several months left to work. “My editor said, `Zieman, you seem like you have some talent, but make one more mistake and you’re fired.’ That made an indelible impression on my young mind,” he said.
Famed Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White recounted in his autobiography a terrible mistake attributed to him while working at the evening Lawrence Tribune. The heading for an obituary that White wrote inadvertently was placed over an advertisement for a gas stove:
“Died, Mrs. Julian Hutt.
“My dear lady, the hot weather is at last upon you. Get your gasoline stove ready and save yourself while you can.”
Ouch.
The Star has mechanisms in place to prevent, or at least slow, the influx of mistakes. Every fact in every story must be verified by the reporter. An assigning editor reads and questions the information before sending it over to the copy desk. The information then is read again and spot-checked by copy editors.
Newsroom employees go to “verification school” after they are hired. There are few papers holding similar “schools.”
My fellow ombudsmen at newspapers around the country recently were discussing an increase in corrections at their newspapers. Some thought the increase might be due to more people calling in to correct mistakes – in light of recent public gaffes by journalists.
This provides an opportunity to gently remind readers that correcting the newspaper’s mistakes is partly your job, too. The phone number and e-mail address of the writer are listed at the end of most local stories.
Making mistakes and owning up to them are two things that newspapers do. The trick is to decrease the former, while never decreasing the latter.
