From the Star Tribune’s article:
…By the end of 2006, the Star Tribune had published 613 corrections and clarifications.
It’s
easy to analyze away the import of that number. After all, it comes
down to fewer than two corrections a day in a large publication created
from the ground up on deadline. It’s only two more corrections than we
published in 2005.
Plus, a good slice of those corrections
involved source errors, where a reporter interviewed someone who
misspoke or didn’t have his or her facts straight. Generally we just
print a correction that doesn’t identify the source of the bad
information, assuming readers don’t really care about the background
and just want the right information.
While the number of errors
in the Star Tribune is in line with the totals for newspapers of
similar size, it nags at me this time of year when I tote up the
numbers.
I worked with Managing Editor Scott Gillespie last
year to analyze the types of errors occurring and it became clear that
usually they aren’t complicated, they’re brain burps by someone working
fast, often someone who knew the correct information or easily could
have checked.
A majority of the errors involved such things as
name spellings, e-mail addresses, historic events or records, math,
whether a picture matched the name in the caption, whether the country
was marked correctly on a map…
From Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple:
Our annual error report shows that in 2006 we published 532
corrections, down 8 percent from our total of 577 in 2005. This was the
lowest number of corrections since 2003, when the Rocky published 456.
Accuracy, of course, is a fundamental building block of the kind
of newspaper we want to be. But so is the willingness to correct our
mistakes. That’s why I’m not necessarily concerned that we published
more corrections in ‘06 than we did in ‘03, because I think it’s
indicative that our process is better…
The biggest single number of corrections occurs because of
reporter error. That’s to be expected. There can be misunderstandings
in the gathering of news that editors do not detect…
Our top five types of errors were basic reporting, 141;
misspelled names, 45; wrong names, 35; editors introducing mistakes,
25; and, believe it or not, wrong dates, 23…
From the Yakima Herald Republic:
…In 2006, we published 275 corrections and
clarifications, down from the 287 we published in 2005 and the 279 we
published in 2004.
For last year, that works out to roughly three published corrections or clarifications for every four days.
Our goal of no corrections at all is unrealistic; we simply handle far too much information from far too many sources.
That makes it even more important that we maintain our goal of correcting information we get wrong, for whatever reason…
