Regret the Error

Toronto Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski was inspired to write a column last week about newspaper errors after spotting this correction in the Toronto Star, a competing newspaper:

Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs 1939-1993 is 1,152 pages, which means that its price per page is 4.5 cents. An incorrect page count was given in a Nov. 25 comparison between his and Jean Chretien’s recently published books. The Star regrets the error.

Bonokoski called the editor of the Star to “inquire if the correction was made at the behest of Mr. Mulroney himself who, one would think, would have more on his mind these days that an incorrect page count regarding his recently published memoir-in-progress.”
In fact, as usual, a Star spokesman said “it was a gazzilion readers wondering how a 3-pound book could possibly have only 100 pages.They did the math, obviously, and the phone never stopped ringing.
“But, no, it was not Mulroney who called.”
The column continues:

This newspaper, like the Star, has a well-stated policy to correct all significant errors brought to the editor’s attention. And, since no one working here is non-human (on most days), we tend to make our share of mistakes in the chaotic pot-boiling, helter skelter of putting out a daily newspaper — even though, like most major newspapers, the mistakes are surprisingly few.
How a newspaper even manages to make it to the street each day is still a miracle that has never been totally explained, and so errors are bound to happen from time to time.
Still, each and every error drives us all crazy — the reporter or columnist involved, and the editors who oversee them. And I write this confessing to have made my share of mistakes over the last 30 years, although relatively few in retrospect, none of a truly serious nature, and none that have ended at the losing end of a libel action or having to suffer the castigation of the Ontario Press Council.
It is not a business to take accuracy lightly, and those that do, do so at their own peril.
What I have learned, however, is that readers rarely fail to catch each and every error, even the truly minor ones.
It comes, I think, from their sense of proprietorship.
It is their newspaper, and they care about it.
And, secondly, each reader who catches a mistake invariably thinks he or she is the only one to have caught it — or the first one, at the very least, if they call early enough in the day. And it gives them great joy.
Sometimes it is just a typo that brings the grief…
So far this year, there have been two corrections in this newspaper where fault can be placed directly on my shoulders. One was the result of me naming the wrong community service club involved in helping to organize the Friday the 13th biker days in Port Dover, and the other was the result of me hitting the wrong but in-close-proximity key, and tying “Maria” rather than “Marla” when writing about the mother of recently murdered RCMP Const. Doug Scott, who was raised in my hometown of Lyn, just outside the St. Lawrence Seaway town of Brockville.
That mistake, without question, troubled me profoundly.
Anyone who practises journalism, or teaches it in our universities and colleges, will know that a goodly number of errors often come, not in the body copy, but in the headlines or the picture captions.
In a recent column about lunatic 14 Division cop-turned-killer Richard Wills, for example, his name turned up in the headline as Willis.
Proofreaders should catch these errors, and most often do. But, then again, to err is human.
I don’t know precisely how many readers called or e-mailed to set me straight that day, but there were well over two dozen. And the gist of them all was this: “How can you be so stupid as to write the wrong name in the headline over your own column?”
The short answer, of course, is that reporters and columnists do not write the headlines, and nor do they write the captions under the photographs that accompany their pieces.
Those are written by desk editors who, during the course of putting a newspaper to bed, write scores of headlines and scores of captions — all under the constant pressure of deadline.
So they occasionally make mistakes, too.
That said, when a newspaper states up-front that it “regrets the error,” it truly does regret the error. It goes to credibility and, without credibility, all else is lost.
Good reputations do not come without hard work, and there is pride to be found in hard work done well.