But what’s notable about the Times story is the information offered up in response by readers’ representative Deirdre Edgar:

When readers write in about errors, it shows they care, and that’s a good thing. Research done for the American Copy Editors Society this spring confirmed what the Readers’ Rep inbox tells us.

Fred Vultee, a journalism professor at Wayne State University, studied a group of readers over a three-month period. His findings:

• Readers who read more news tend to be more critical than people who read less.
• Dedicated readers expect a higher level of quality than casual readers, particularly in terms of grammar and professionalism.
• Readers notice grammar errors and find them troubling and distracting.
• Readers notice writing that is garbled and confusing, and when words are misspelled or misused.

Most readers are less concerned about errors of style and story structure than they are about professionalism and grammar. “They really don’t care if you abbreviate ‘road,’ Vultee said. “They don’t care if you start a paragraph with a number.”

I hadn’t heard about Vultee’s work, and there’s a summary of it here. There’s one other key finding that’s worth noting:

Readers can tell edited from unedited stories in significant ways.

That’s an interesting finding. I hope to learn more from Vultee about some of the differences noted by readers.

His successor, Patrick B. Pexton, has now weighed in with a blog post that looks at recent errors in the paper, and also quotes an anonymous message from a former* staffer. From the message:

I have been reluctant to write this e-mail. But I can no longer hold my tongue. The quality of copy editing at the paper is abysmal. Yet again, while reading a story, I have found another error — a ‘they’ where it should have read ‘the’ — that literally made me stop reading the story and write this e-mail.

Unfortunately, it’s not a rare occurrence — countless stories and blogs with words left out or misspellings or grammatical errors. Is anybody reading what goes on up on the Web site or in the paper?

Pexton cites three causes of error:

First, mathematics is at play here: Fewer editors plus much more copy equals more mistakes. The Washington Post is not just a print publication anymore — far more copy, from stories to blogs, exists online than in print. The print edition is a fraction of what editors edit every day.

Second, copy editors (multiplatform editors, in today’s parlance) also now deal with material for mobile devices and tablet computers. Each of these four platforms — print, online, mobile, tablet — has different procedures and may require distinct headlines and captions; a story can be prepared by the copy editor not once but four times.

Third, mistakes occur more frequently online than in print, generally, because online copy goes through fewer editors. Stories headed into the newspaper go through more editors. But online errors are easier and faster to correct. Print is still forever. Readers take mistakes in print more seriously than online errors.

He ends with this: “Something has to be done to shake up the copy editing system at The Post so it doesn’t let mistakes like this weekend’s get published. It’s too important to the credibility of The Post.”

Looking back at what Alexander had written, I was reminded the paper had already shaken up its copy editing system. Alexander’s final column mentioned mistakes at the paper. After that was published, there was this response from Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli in a Q&A with readers back in January:

The ombudsman is right that there have been too many careless errors lately–typos, grammatical errors, silly factual mistakes. I don’t want to make excuses, because we shouldn’t tolerate these sorts of errors. But by way of explanation I will say that we have made a number of changes in our processes in the last couple of years and are putting in a new editing system that will further change workflows for editors.

So is the new editing system not fully in place? Is it in place and not working? Have things actually improved compared to a couple of years ago? I encourage Pexton to get some answers to these questions. (And for Post staffers to contact me or add a comment.)

Also: Check out Erik Wemple’s take on Pexton’s post.

*Correction October 25, 2011: I forgot to put the word “former” in front of the word “staffer” when referring to a message that had been sent to Post public editor Patrick B. Pexton. This gave the incorrect impression the message he was sent came from a current employee of the paper, rather than a former one. I added the word in the sentence. Thanks Doug!

… 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. The once-broken system for publishing corrections has been repaired, but corrections often still take too long to appear. The list goes on.

Much of this is a result of upheaval, disruption and necessary cost-cutting. Over the past few years, once-separate

print and online staffs have been combined. The traditional newsroom structure was blown up and reconfigured. New editors are in charge. Scores of staffers have been reassigned.

And in a Q&A with readers, Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli seems to agree:

The ombudsman is right that there have been too many careless errors lately–typos, grammatical errors, silly factual mistakes. I don't want to make excuses, because we shouldn't tolerate these sorts of errors. But by way of explanation I will say that we have made a number of changes in our processes in the last couple of years and are putting in a new editing system that will further change workflows for editors. We try to be diligent about publishing corrections, and the data are interesting: we published 1,054 corrections in 2010, up from 1,040 a year earlier and 961 in 2008, but down from a recent high of 1,319 in 2005. We have room to improve.

It's good news that the Post is bringing in a new system. The old one has been cut and altered to the point that it's a shell of its former self. Let's hope the new system improves workflow and quality. A challenge, to be sure. But a worthy one.

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 that we were correcting; it was the correction that went viral. Erik gave everyone a writing test in the interview, so we could see their raw copy. You do need to screen for copy quality. If copy editing resources can’t be what they used to be, then maybe you can no longer afford that staff member who’s a good reporter but a mediocre or even bad writer. Or even a good writer but a lousy speller. Or you need to demand that they get better and start compensating for the weaknesses they know they have.

Anyway, I think in today’s value analysis, clean copy especially AP style isn’t as valuable as it used to be or has been surpassed in value by some other factors. As an editor, I did occasionally field calls from people complaining about grammar and spelling, but never about AP style. When those people told me our proofreaders were doing a lousy job, I told them that newspapers haven’t had proofreaders for decades, which just underscores that technology and value change with time. And newspapers have never employed fact-checkers, an added quality step employed by some magazines. Quality has always been a relative matter, with publications deciding how much they could afford to spend in pursuit of unattainable perfection. I hope the value equation continues to support copy editors at most operations, but that’s a decision individual editors, publishers and group presidents will have to make with their budgets, their value equations and their communities.

– via Publishers have to weigh the value of clean copy, a post on The Buttry Diary by Steve Buttry.

When the Sentinel tightened its financial belt back in June, it lost a wealth of seasoned veterans, many of them editors. Those journalists not only wrote headlines and captions. They also scrutinized the work of reporters — correcting spelling, straightening out syntax, double-checking facts — before publication.
With fewer people to do that now, less of that important work gets done, and the result is more published errors.

Yesterday, the ombudsman of the Washington Post wrote basically the same column:

…Growing numbers of readers are contacting the ombudsman to complain about typos and small errors.

"As a virtually lifelong subscriber, I am disheartened by the increasingly poor quality of the editing of The Post," wrote Richard Murphy of Alexandria. If typos can’t be caught by a spell-checker, "then The Post should restore a couple of copy editor positions. You have cut that staff too much."

The Post’s copy editors are among the best I’ve worked with during nearly four decades in the newspaper business. But they’ve been badly depleted by staff cuts as the money-losing paper struggles to control costs. Those who remain are stretched thin while The Post expands to a 24-hour news operation in print and online.

Between early 2005 and mid-2008, the number of full-time copy editors dropped from about 75 to 43 through buyouts or voluntary departures. It has declined further since then, but Post managers won’t provide precise figures beyond saying that six took a recent buyout offer. The need is so critical that most are being hired back on contract through at least the end of the year, and part-timers are taking up some of the slack.

Copy editors are the unsung heroes of newsrooms. Unknown to the public, and often underappreciated by their colleagues, they’re the last line of defense against a correction or, worse, a libel suit…

"By definition, you’ll see more errors when there’s reduced staffing," said Bill Walsh, the A-section copy desk chief. On a typical weeknight a few years ago, Walsh said, the three copy desks handling national, foreign and business news could rely on perhaps 20 editors. Those desks have since been combined into one desk, headed by Walsh. Today, he said, "there are some shifts where I’m looking at seven or eight people total."…

These papers are by no means the only ones experiencing a spike in errors due to the loss of bodies on the copy desk. Adding to the problem is the fact that the move online means papers are churning out more content than ever before. Yet copy editors — and magazine fact checkers — are being shown the door.

Carl Sessions Stepp examined how some newsrooms are coping with this challenge is his recent article, "The Quality-Control Quandary,” It’s a must-read. I fear, though, that few organizations are rethinking their quality control process and means of verification. They’re just trying to do more with less. It’s a recipe for disaster.

I looked at this issue in a recent essay I wrote for Harvard’s Niemen Neiman Reports:

For more than 100 years, one of the most recognizable slogans in journalism has been “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Lately, The New York Times motto is being challenged by the familiar phrase, “do more with less.” This new saying was, in fact, the theme of the World Editors Forum scheduled for March, but the event had to be cancelled “due to the impact of the global financial downturn on newspaper companies.”

News organizations are shedding employees. Those that remain are expected to pick up the slack and also push ahead with digital initiatives. Included in the exodus are valuable copyeditors—the people in whose encyclopedic brains reside a lot of what prevents errors from surfacing in stories. The few, the proud—and disappearing—magazine fact checkers are also being told to grab their World Almanacs and Book of Facts and move along.

Accuracy is a huge journalistic challenge. When reporters are asked to take on more work while the newsroom’s same fallible processes and error-prone technologies remain in place, the result will undoubtedly be a further downward slide in quality. More errors will be followed by more apologies and more corrections. And this is happening at a critical time for journalism—a time when consumers are being asked by journalists using digital media to lend support to their newsgathering mission…

By John E. McIntyre

Not everything that is wrong merits public correction.

It would be extremely unusual, for example, for a newspaper, magazine, or Web site to run a formal correction for an error in grammar or English usage, or for a typographical error, though there are exceptions, as when 24 Hours quoted a councilman as saying that the costs of a tunnel were “now being lowballed” instead of “not being lowballed.” Such lapses are dealt with, if at all, in in-house newsletters or memos, of which Philip B. Corbett’s excellent After Deadline at The New York Times website is an example.  

Formal corrections, such as those aggregated on this site, almost always focus on errors of fact: 

The wrong name for a person or organization — The New York Times has admitted to getting Procter and Gamble’s name wrong as Proctor and Gamble more than 100 times.  

Erroneous statistics — The Toronto Star published in May that 1,700 wind turbines are in operation in Europe; the number is about 74,000. Also in May, the paper estimated the cost or a new nuclear plant as $7,000 per megawatt of installed capacity, but the correct number is $7,000 per kilowatt. Distinguishing between mega and kilo, like the distinction between million and billion, is a hazard for mathematically impaired journalists. 

Bungled photo captions — The Washington Times ran a photo of the Obama children to illustrate an article about homicides of children in Chicago.

Recipes — You might not want to attempt any published recipe until, say, five days or a week past publication. The Hamilton Spectator ran a recipe for a ginger cake during Celiac Awareness Month than called for two cups of penne pasta instead of two cups of rice pasta.   

Popular culture — The Guardian’s  review of the latest Star Trek movie referred to a character as a Klingon rather than a Romulan, and the Los Angeles Times referred to the character as Captain Nemo instead of Captain Nero.

Wrong word — The New York Times quoted Rep. Anthony D. Weiner as saying, “You’ll forgive some of my constituents for wanting to get into the fetal poison and bathe in Purell.” He said “fetal position.”  

And more, such as people who are very much alive being reported as dead.  

But not even every error of fact winds up being corrected. When errors are identified, a responsible editor or small group of editors will determine whether they are significant enough to merit formal notice. How many minor errors of fact pass unnoticed is not easy to determine. But published corrections almost always follow when a reader complains of an error.

Sometimes a publication decides to run a clarification rather than a correction, in contexts in which the published statement of fact was technically accurate but lacked some nuance of wording or additional detail and therefore permitted a misreading.  

And in the free-for-all word of electronic publishing, some Web sites do not commonly publish corrections at all, instead updating the published articles with silent corrections as the day wears on. Bloggers, or at least the responsible ones, will authorize readers’ corrections through comments and will also apologize for errors in comments or subsequent posts. But the practice on the Web has not yet standardized.  

One thing that the Internet has beneficially fostered is the proliferation of apologies for plagiarisms and fabrication. The ease of theft through copying and pasting electronic texts is matched only by the ease of detection of such theft. And with bloggers and other commentators quick to jump on any publication detected in apparent jiggery-pokery — such as Maureen Dowd’s recent appropriation of a passage from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo — it becomes difficult for a publication to deal quietly and privately with these matters.