This newspaper printed nearly 700 corrections for mistakes we made in our news columns in 2002. Now, bear with me for a while, please, and let me explain why that’s a good thing.
The 694 corrections we published last year — the most we have compiled since we started keeping track a few years ago — still represent only a fraction of the mistakes that creep every day into news stories, photo captions, headlines and other parts of the paper.
About half of them were errors that readers pointed out and that we would probably never have caught if not for your alert eyes.
More than a few of them we learned about when you were inconvenienced by going to the wrong address for an event, or showing up at the wrong time or date, or when you called a number we printed only to find out it had nothing to do with what you needed.
These kinds of errors — the ones that show up in items in the paper that many readers depend on to make household decisions about where to go and what to do — are real credibility killers.
If the newspaper can’t get that basic information right, I hear you say all the time, how can you trust us to analyze government budgets or explain complicated issues?
Still, catching errors after publication and correcting them even a day or two late is the first step toward preventing more of them before they get into print.
Keeping the heat on reporters and editors to correct mistakes — while keeping track of how they were made and what can be done to prevent them from happening again — should eventually lead to a reduction in the number of errors.
Eventually.
I say that because I can’t guarantee that this time next year I won’t be reporting that we had more corrections than ever in 2003. What we can guarantee is that reducing errors is one of the primary goals of the top editors of the paper.
We started the year with a renewed emphasis within the staff to own up to our errors and take aggressive steps to prevent them from happening.
If this week was any indication, the challenge is huge. On Tuesday, for instance, we published nine corrections for mistakes we made in virtually every section of the newspaper, some of them more than a week old.
The mistakes ran the usual gamut of reporting and editing errors — misspelled names in photo captions, a wrong telephone number with an arts event, writing the name Clark Clifford instead of Clifford Alexander when referring to the former secretary of the Army and dropping a line of type from a direct quote at the very end of a lengthy political profile.
Like about two-thirds of all our mistakes, most of these would have been caught with more aggressive fact checking and page proofing (quickly becoming a lost art, I’m afraid, in the new publishing world) before publication.
But doing that requires enforcing an accuracy ethic that demands taking time at nearly every stage of production of a story to check ourselves.
Is this name spelled correctly? Has her title changed since the last time we interviewed her?
Does the name in the photo caption match the name in the story? Did someone look at that page proof after changing the size of the headline from an earlier edition?
One interesting thing we’ve found recently in emphasizing fact checking is how often we overlook misspelled names and numerical typos when we view stories on a computer screen.
Reporters who have stepped up their own efforts to ensure accuracy swear the best way to catch errors is to print out their stories first and fact check them by hand before turning them over to an editor.
In the coming year we’ll be employing this and other methods to do a better job and maybe, just maybe, we’ll have fewer errors to report this year than last.
