Comments on: You Don’t Say: Fixing the blame

By: Joshua

Joshua — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:15:52 +0000

Charlene: No, the Blat copy editor has it right. The copy editor wrote that Ouagadougou was the capital of Burkina Faso, which it is. However, in the hypothetical example, the Blat apparently has a policy of embarrassing the reporters by identifying the errors they make which get corrected by the copy editor in the body of the article, but get called out in a tag at the end of the article.

In the example, the reporter was apparently looking at a pre-1975 map and also failing to notice which city went with which country, thus placing Ouagadougou in a neighboring country and identifying that neighboring country by an old name.

By: Charlene

Charlene — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:35:07 +0000

The 'Blat copy editor' needs to pull out his atlas. Benin hasn't been known as Dahomey since 1975. (Upper Volta wasn't renamed Burkina Faso until 1984, so even historically this correction would have been inaccurate.)

By: DaveBrooks

DaveBrooks — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:38:24 +0000

While it's true that most readers don't care two hoots about bylines, sources do care, and their opinion matters for future stories. A reporter will hear about a printed correction from sources involved with that story. In fact, you'd better hear feedback about a correction: If you don't hear anything, you're out of touch with your beat.

If the error was caused by an editor and is bone-headed enough to make your sources take you less seriously (confusing “million” and “billion”, or mixing up the name of a locally prominent person), then absolutely the correction should say “Due to an editor's error …” – otherwise you're harming the value of your reporters with the people they depend on for future stories.

Of course, when it *is* the reporter's fault the correction should say so (”Due to a reporting error …” ) And these days, it usually is the reporter's fault because there are so few editors any more that copy hardly gets touched between writer and reader.