Reader Vivian Melchers called recently to complain about the Sentinel’s lack of accuracy, citing as evidence “too many corrections.”
Corrections, of course, do indicate an accuracy problem, and Melchers made a good point: The Sentinel has had quite a few in the past year.
In fact, the newspaper published 738 corrections or clarifications during 2002, an average of 61.5 a month — or two a day. That was 235 more than it published the year before and twice as many as the year before that.
Editor Tim Franklin, though, said he doesn’t think the Sentinel contains many more mistakes now than it did two years ago. He suggested, instead, “we’re doing a much more rigorous job of tracking them.”
Whichever is the case, it may please Melchers and other readers to learn that the Sentinel is on the case. After collecting much-more-detailed information about errors — including how they could have been avoided — this past year, the newspaper has assembled a committee of eight journalists from throughout the newsroom to pore over those records and come up with some solutions.
Among that information, they will find that:
* Sentinel staff members’ errors caused 79 percent of the total; incorrect information supplied to the newspaper caused 28 percent; the overlap is explained by 7 percent attributed to both categories.
* Faulty newsgathering was the culprit in more than a third of the errors the newspaper committed, followed by problems with the writing of articles, headline and caption writing, text editing, graphic illustrations and photography, in that order. Only 1.26 percent of those errors could not have been avoided.
* The greatest number of items corrected or clarified appeared either in the Local & State section or in one or more of the sections of local news that go to specific counties.
The Sentinel will correct anything it finds that’s wrong — including in that sea of tiny type in the Sports section that provides detailed information about countless sporting events.
A perusal of the past year’s corrections, in fact, makes clear that most errors involve less-than-momentous information.
For example:
* A correction May 14 alerted readers that the numbers published for the preceding Sunday’s Fantasy 5 lottery drawing were incorrect. They were incorrect because they were the winning numbers for the Georgia drawing.
* A correction Oct. 29 called attention to a problem with the daylight-saving-time graphic illustrations on the previous weekend’s front pages. They mistakenly suggested that readers should spring forward rather than fall back.
* On New Year’s Eve, the Sentinel had to confess a directory of Lake County schools published two days before was riddled with errors. Editors mistakenly had picked up a list that was years old.
The newspaper tends to get the big stuff right. But whether weighty or trivial, all errors get serious attention in the Sentinel.
“Publishing them [clarifications],” Franklin said, “shows that you’re committed to accuracy. It helps your credibility with readers to own up to your mistakes. And, after all, a newsroom is composed of imperfect human beings often working under very intense deadline pressure.”
He’s correct about that.
