Getting it right
My newspaper column
Nothing gets under the skin of an editor like publishing a mistake in a story. A mistake is worse than a missed story or getting beat by a competitor. Getting lectured by a windbag politician is even better than making a mistake in a story.
For the record, the big "important" errors are not the worst. Those are the small mistakes that have the greatest personal consequences: the misspelled names, the wrong dates, the transposition of digits in a phone number. They not only inconvenience people, they disrespect them, too.
That hit home last Sunday when we inadvertently substituted the name of Grimsley High School's second-string goalkeeper for the name of the starting keeper in a story about the boy's soccer team playing in the state championship.
I follow the Whirlies soccer team, and I know the first-string keeper, Will Curtis, and his parents. I opened the Sunday paper, hoping to read about a Grimsley victory, only to stop cold when the story referred to someone other than Will as the keeper.
At first, I thought Will had gotten hurt, but in my heart, I suspected we had made a mistake, and we had.
Robbing a student of the credit for a well-earned achievement, whether on the field or in the classroom, is one of the worst kinds of mistake. Most readers wouldn't notice or care, but the person whose name is left out certainly does. Van King, retired publisher of this paper, used to tell of meeting a successful middle-aged businessman who said that one of his greatest memories was getting his name in the paper years earlier when he played high school football.
These days, the high school student may as likely hunt for his name online as he does in the newspaper, but either way, it's a search for personal affirmation.
We know the value of that, which is why it is so irritating when we make careless mistakes.
We have a strict policy to correct errors of fact as soon as we learn of them. Setting the record straight is vital to maintaining credibility. It’s the right thing to do.
We often assemble the paper under the crush of looming deadlines, conflicting information and unforgiving space restrictions. That explains some of the errors, but not all. Most of the time, simple carelessness trips us up.
To provide some perspective, we publish hundreds of thousands of names, dates and numbers accurately and precisely each year. The number of corrections we publish is down year over year. Yet some mistakes still slip in.
To reduce them, writers are expected to make a notation that they have double-checked names, ages, addresses, phone numbers, days and dates in their work before it is submitted to an editor. That doesn't catch every mistake, but it stops most.
Some readers have suggested we publish the corrections on the front page, but it is rare that the news value of a correction is worth that prominence. For more than 20 years, we have anchored our corrections on the second page of the first section. We think readers know where to find them.
As another measure of accuracy, we randomly select people quoted in our stories and send them a survey asking if we captured their comments accurately. We send surveys to people featured in all sorts of stories, including those who may not be inclined to say nice things about us.
We are running at a 92 percent accuracy rate, which is better than it sounds when you factor in the satisfied sources who didn't bother to send back the surveys. Still, that doesn't help the Will Curtises of the world. We can do better.
You can help us; if you see an error, let us know so that we can correct it.
Sunday update: Just received this note from a reader: But are you not mindful, John, of the pleasure and delight such errata bring to those who discover them?