Ah, the new year. While the rest of the world talks of fresh starts and new resolve, your ombudsman sees it as the ideal time to tally all the errors made by this newspaper in the year just ended. The total, just in, sets a record of dubious distinction.
The Globe ran 901 corrections, clarifications, omissions, and editor’s notes in 2002. That easily tops the previous record of 762 in 2001 and is by far the biggest increase since recordkeeping began 17 years ago.
So this is bad news, right?
Well, it’s not good news – 901 cases in which something needed to be corrected or explained is nothing to celebrate – but it’s hard to know just what the increase means.
It’s possible the Globe is not making more mistakes, just admitting to it more often. Although the policy to correct all errors has been in place for more than a decade, perhaps reporters and editors have, with a new editor, begun to acknowledge errors that went unnoted in the past.
Another benefit-of-the-doubt interpretation: It’s not that staffers are increasingly sloppy, but that added pages of text – particularly in the zoned editions, where news output has almost tripled in the last year and a half – provide more opportunity for inevitable human error.
It’s possible those two factors alone account for the increase. It’s also possible that they don’t – and that greater news demands, reduced resources, or other factors have eroded accuracy enough to warrant redoubled attention in 2003.
”While I’m naturally disappointed at the number of errors, I am pleased that we are forthrightly dealing with them,” says Editor Martin Baron. ”It’s a mistake to interpret a rise in corrections as a rising problem of inaccuracy. In fact, it can be – and I think is in our case – a more frank acknowledgment of our own fallibility and our genuine desire to set the record straight.” He adds: ”Ultimately, of course, our objective is to reduce the overall number of errors.”
Readers, of course, are the ones who pay the everyday price for the Globe’s inaccuracy. A reporter or editor gets careless and, as a result, a reader battles downtown traffic only to find that her congressman is not speaking where the Globe said he would be. Or bets a friend that Iowa State University is indeed in Iowa City – and loses $5. Or suffers the embarrassment of addressing the mayor of Worcester by what turns out to be not his name at all. All were corrected errors in 2002.
Along with such routine fare were a few more serious errors that, once acknowledged, undercut the main idea being reported. One example was an article about the hard-to-find publications on crime that then-candidate Kerry Healey listed as books she had authored. The article said they were available only through Internet download or special order from an arm of the Justice Department and advised, ”Don’t expect her to autograph copies at your local Barnes & Noble any time soon.” Oops. Turns out Healey’s books were sold via the Barnes & Noble Web site.
It’s worth noting that very few of the 901 corrections, clarifications, omissions, and editor’s notes of 2002 (hereafter referred to collectively as corrections, because the vast majority were) appeared because of errors in the 800 stories on abuse in the Catholic Church.
Other items of interest emerge in the comprehensive year-end summary compiled by the diligent staff of the Globe library:
– Only about a third of all corrections appear in the ”For the record” corner on Page A2. The rest are noted in the column that carried the error or somewhere in the relevant section.
This is a departure from a longstanding tradition that made A2 the home of corrections. And it contradicts the Globe’s own style book, which notes that nearly all corrections belong there.
Although running corrections in the offending section may be a well-intentioned effort to reach readers who saw the original mistake, I believe shifting the bulk of corrections back to A2 is even more reader-friendly. It’s where they know to look.
– Although a few reporters have six or more corrections to their name, most reporters have one, or none.
– The City & Region section generated the most corrections – 194 in all. That’s no surprise, given that it is the department with the most staff and often works on deadline. Second was Arts & Living, with 105 – or 127 if you include the Arts/Entertainment section. The five zoned editions (Globes North, West, etc.) together generated 131 corrections.
– Reporting errors were the cause of more than half the 901 corrections, but editors contributed 235. Only 58 corrections could be blamed on outsiders who provided wrong information.
– About a third of the corrections, or 306, resulted from misidentifying a person – Joseph was called James, or an uncle was described as a brother, for example. The next most frequent error was misrepresentation, such as wrongly describing the conclusions of a report. Not all errors are deemed correction-worthy. Grammatical slips generally don’t get acknowledged. Nor do all misspellings, although 57 did in 2002.
Even if the corrections jump in 2002 does not represent increased sloppiness, there is ample reason in 2003 to bring that number down – not by declining to print corrections when they are warranted, but by making sure that the staff understands the need to doublecheck all facts, and has the time and ability to do so.
