Regret the Error

The New York Times’ new public editor, Byron Calame, used his latest Sunday column for a Q&A with  Allan M. Siegal, a Times assistant managing editor who also serves as the paper’s standards editor. Among other duties, Siegal oversees the corrections section. The interview is online here, and some relevant excerpts are below. Of interest is Siegal’s comment that the paper is currently "averaging 10 [corrections] a day or a little more."

PUBLIC EDITOR How do you describe the job of standards editor?

MR. SIEGAL
I’m supposed to be the recipient of any complaints and misgivings by
the staff about how we’re doing and what we’re doing, the person who
adjudicates differences of opinion about how we should go about
reporting and editing stories.

By the charter that my job was
given when it was set up, I have the guaranteed right to go not just to
the executive editor with any misgivings I have, but directly to the
publisher. On one occasion, when I thought that there was too much
opinion seeping into the news pages, I went to both of them
simultaneously. But that’s the only time I’ve felt it necessary to
involve the publisher.

I spend time helping staff members
navigate our ethics and conflict-of-interest policies, and I’m the
person who interprets those rules for them. I spend, also, a fair
amount of time helping the paper decide when something should be
corrected.

I also believe – and I do a certain amount of possibly
tedious preaching – that we can save ourselves a lot of pain if we
don’t do anything that we would be embarrassed to have readers know
about, that everything we do ought to be something we’re willing to
describe to readers and tell them about…

Q. How much are you involved with corrections?

A.
I edit and sign off on every correction we print when I’m in town. If
I’m out of town someplace where I can get a decent-speed Internet
connection, I do it even on the road. We seem to be, these days,
averaging 10 a day or a little more. I edit them all, partly because
I’m a fussbudget and I used to be a copy editor and I can’t help myself.

I
think over the years, particularly the last two or three years, staff
members have gotten much more willing to admit mistakes. But people are
human, and some number of times a week I find myself helping somebody
over the reluctance to admit error in print. And I sort of arrived at
an aphorism that I use with a lot of them: if we were writing the story
today, knowing what we know now, would we write it exactly the way we
wrote it yesterday? And if the answer is no, we would do something
different, then it seems to me that’s evidence that we need a
correction to bridge the distance between what we did and what we now
know we should have done.

Q: What constitutes fairness for you?

A.
Well, I always oppose the suggestion that there have to be exactly as
many pictures, on the front page, of the Republican candidate as of the
Democratic, or vice versa, during a presidential campaign. I think each
day is different. Although I think there comes a tipping point when
after three or four days of making your most legitimate, conscientious
news judgment, you still find yourself running the same side on Page 1
every day. Then you have to put a thumb on the scale a little bit to
get the balance back.

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