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I’m a bit behind in posting links to my weekly column for Columbia Journalism Review online. Here are pointers to three recent columns, with excerpts. My full column archive is online here.
Today’s column:
A Rare Peek at Why Errors Occur
Last Sunday’s New York Times was a treasure trove of accuracy-related information, and I don’t mean the paper’s corrections column.
Readers were treated to a pair of articles that offered an impressive amount of insight into mistakes. One was a rare look back at the causes of recent mistakes made by the Times; the other piece seemingly had nothing to do with the press, yet it was just as valuable to journalism.
In the first story of note, Clark Hoyt, the public editor, dedicated his column to walking back the cat on three Times errors.
“Last month,” he wrote, “because reporters and editors in three different parts of the paper did not take enough pains to verify information, The Times reported as fact a political telephone call that didn’t happen, fell victim to a faked letter to the editor, and published a sensational anecdote about a college football recruiting battle that the paper cannot be confident is true.”
Hoyt took the time to go to the editors and reporters involved in the mistakes and ask them how and why the errors occured. The reasons included failing to follow the paper’s existing verification policies (the fake letter) and poor communication (the phantom phone call). The “sensational anecdote” was published due to the combination of an uncooperative and unreliable source, an editor working on Christmas day, and a high school English essay that included a reference to women “romancing each other.”
To those who think accuracy is boring stuff, eat your hearts out …
Last week’s:
To Repeat or Not To Repeat?
To repeat or not to repeat?
It’s a simple question, yet it has vexed editors and correction writers for decades. Is it nobler to restate the error in a correction, or to offer a basic description of the mistake?
Derek Donovan, the reader’s editor of the Kansas City Star, adheres to a policy that proscribes restating the error in a correction. In a recent blog post, he offered a hypothetical scenario:
“For example, let’s say a story refers to Jamie Smith, but she really spells her name Jamie Smyth. The correction should not say: A story in the Nov. 26 Local section misspelled Jamie Smyth’s last name as Smith.
That’s a bad idea because it puts the mistake in the paper a second time. Better simply to write: A story in the Nov. 26 Local section misspelled Jamie Smyth’s last name.”
The goal of not stating the error is to prevent the paper from compounding the offense. It’s similar to the policy of not repeating a libelous statement …
The week before last:
Letter Imperfect
Though it takes up a relatively small amount of real estate, a newspaper or magazine’s letters to the editor section punches far above its weight when it comes to errors and corrections.
Just over the past couple of years, there have been plagiarized letters that made it into print, letters that included egregious factual errors and accusations, letters that were attributed to the wrong person, and letters that were significantly altered due to sloppy editing. Last month alone there were two notable letter errors …
