The Los Angeles Times has been hearing complaints from readers about typos and grammatical errors. The feedback was mentioned in this piece. Just about every newspaper these days gets complaints of that nature, and it’s good that readers speak up. But what’s notable about the Times story is the information offered up in response by [...]
At some point every newly appointed ombudsman/public editor will address the issue of errors and corrections. Often they come back to it again and again. The former ombudsman at the Washington Post, Andrew Alexander, is a good example. (See here, here, here). His successor, Patrick B. Pexton, has now weighed in with a blog post [...]
In his final column, outgoing Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander writes that the Post … has become riddled with typos, grammatical mistakes and intolerable "small" factual errors that erode credibility. Local news coverage, once robust, has withered. The Post often trails the competition on stories. The excessive use of anonymous sources has expanded into blogs. [...]
We have no copy editors at TBD and got criticized for that after a famous correction. While the newsroom staffing was Editor Erik Wemple’s decision, I fully support it. You can’t do everything, and a digital operation can correct after publication with less damage than a print publication very few people saw the original error [...]
Just over two years ago, the public editor of the Orlando Sentinel wrote a column alerting readers to the fact that the paper had experienced a spike in the number of corrections. He was clear about the cause of the increased errors: When the Sentinel tightened its financial belt back in June, it lost a [...]
This post marks the debut of You Don’t Say, a new column by John McIntyre for Regret the Error. John, a newspaper copy editor for 30 years, oversaw The Baltimore Sun’s copy desk from 1995 to 2009. He has taught copy editing at Loyola of Maryland since 1995, and he has conducted workshops on writing [...]
