In 2010, The Star published an even 300 corrections in the print edition, out of around 41,000 separate stories. Those numbers don’t tell the whole story, though. Photographs, captions, graphics and other informational items don’t figure into that 41,000 figure, but they do sometimes generate corrections.

By comparison, 2009 saw 383 corrections out of about 46,000 stories. Even when adjusting for the differences in story count, the percentages follow a downward trend.

Of course, I’m under no illusions that each and every mistake in the paper results in a correction. I’m sure readers sometimes spot errors and don’t have the time or the inclination to pick up the phone or send e-mail to let me know what’s wrong.

I especially hate it when someone alerts me to an error catch in one of the comments users append to the bottom of stories on KansasCity.com — not because I don’t want to know what’s wrong, but because online comments simply aren’t a good way to communicate with The Star. There are literally thousands of separate news items posted to the site every week, and neither I nor anyone else could possibly read through every comment posted there by Web readers.

That’s really too bad, because setting the record straight is a basic tenet of professional journalism, and I can say honestly that nobody in the newsroom has ever pressured me not to run a correction.

– via Time to tally corrections, maybe re-evaluate policy, a column from the paper's readers' representative.

… The Star published 328 corrections in 2010, down slightly from 347 in 2009. While no journalist is ever pleased about any errors, that’s less than one identified published error for every day the Star publishes. Not a bad track record given that we publish the equivalent of a book daily.

On the accuracy front, last year proved to be a substantial improvement over past years. We published 425 corrections in 2008; 497 in 2007 and the all-time high of 512 corrections in 2006.

Still, there were some doozies in 2010. As detailed in my May 22 column, a May 18 article reported a name of a young man gunned down in a gang murder. But the high-school student named in the Star had nothing to do with the incident and was very much alive — much to the relief of his mother, who informed me of this egregious error.

In June, while reporting on G8 security measures in Muskoka, the Star told readers that a local man “has a gun at the ready should protesters get by the army of police and soldiers scouring the brushes.” In fact, what the man had said in a jovial way was: “I’ve got an Easton 32 in the house.”

As reported in our immediate correction, the Easton 32 is a baseball bat, not a gun. The Star apologized to the man for this misunderstanding on the part of an embarrassed reporter who has some familiarity with baseball bats, having once swung a few for the Star’s team …

– via Our year in ‘misteaks,’ a column by Toronto Star public editor Kathy English.

Sunday is the biggest day for Times corrections. It’s when the paper corrects errors from the previous Sunday’s paper, which includes many special sections, as well the magazines. But, yes, 36 is a high number. From the NYTPicker:

It may or may not be a record — we don’t have the energy to plow through more than 100 years of back issues — but today’s NYT corrections column is large as any we’ve been able to find in recent memory. And it’s hard not to see the surge as a reflection of what happens to a newspaper that has lost more than 200 editorial employees to buyouts and layoffs in the last two years.

Other papers have seen an increase in corrections in the wake of layoffs and buyouts, but it’s tough to say if the number of corrections published by the Times has been on the rise. The paper uses an internal database to keep track of its corrections, so it has the data. (It’s also important to note that the number of corrections is not the same as the number of errors.)

This is the pick of the litter from today’s Times:

An article on Nov. 22 about the Dutch province of Friesland included a number of errors.

In reference to Friesland’s history, it was the feudal lords — not the Romans — who had no success conquering the Frisians in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Frisians were mostly Germanic people, not just Saxons, who had migrated there in the fourth and fifth centuries — not the first century. Friesland was considered an autonomous and proud region up to the 1500s — not “through” the Middle Ages. And it fell to the Habsburg Empire — not to the Holy Roman Empire — at the beginning of the 16th century. Also, while Friesland’s agrarian landscape is indeed dotted with terps, mounds measuring from a few to 20 feet high, terps are also found in the North Sea marshlands, encompassing parts of Holland, Germany and Denmark; the mounds are not found just in current-day Friesland.

Of the towns whose squares and alleys the writer explored, it was Stavoren — not Hindeloopen — that had a more prosperous seaport than Amsterdam up until the 1400s, not the 1700s. And the neighboring towns Stavoren and Hindeloopen, in addition to having a thriving trade with Scandinavia, also had a robust trade with the Baltic countries — but not with Russia.

A reader pointed out the errors in an e-mail message on Nov. 29; this correction was delayed for research.

Sunday’s column is something of a follow up. It also revealed that at the end of November the Post had published “about 950 corrections” this year. Alexander began by explaining that the Post often takes weeks or months to publish corrections:

The Post’s internal policies say that when readers point out mistakes, the response should be “prompt.” But too often, reporters and editors move at a snail’s pace to correct errors.

Despite improvement, an analysis of Post corrections this year showed that reported errors routinely went uncorrected for weeks or even months. Many were indisputable and should have been corrected in the following day’s paper.

In the Internet age, this kind of tardiness can be especially damaging. The longer inaccurate information lives on, the greater the risk that it will spread far beyond The Post’s readership. Dawdling on errors also weakens the bond of trust with readers who took the trouble to report them. They become justifiably cynical about The Post’s commitment to accuracy.

Alexander is on point with his criticism. Corrections should not take weeks or months to appear. He cited several examples where the paper dragged its feet. Even more interestingly, he provided a bit of an insider’s view as to how the paper’s corrections process is supposed to work:

Each month, corrections “monitors” in Post news departments are e-mailed a statistical analysis of pending and approved requests. It arrives with a standard admonishment: “It is very important that monitors handle correction requests in a timely fashion.”

Rather than emailing this to the appointed monitors once a month, why doesn’t the paper create an internal corrections-request tracking system that’s similar to software bug trackers? (I’m an unpaid advisor to MediaBugs, a Knight Foundation-funded project aiming to build something along these lines, albeit for public, rather than internal, use.) A system like this could provide automated alerts that make sure the monitors know when they’re falling behind. Also, the senior editorial people responsible for tracking corrections would be able to see which requests are still in the queue. An email once a month simply isn’t enough.

That said, a Post senior editor also raised a few other issues:

Senior Editor Milton Coleman said that an increased workload for editors, coupled with organizational changes and the temporary relocation of staffers during a months-long newsroom renovation, have caused “large gaps” in the corrections process.

But ultimately, he said, the remedy is that “someone has to be tasked with following up on a regular basis” to see that correction requests are being quickly handled.

These are valid problems, but there’s a larger point here: the Post’s internal corrections process isn’t scalable or adaptable. Some staffers get laid off, take buyouts or are reassigned, and the whole thing grinds to a near-halt. That’s not a good system.

Coleman told Alexander that’s he’s been tasked with helping improve the way things work. I suggest he step back from the micro-level issues and examine whether the paper could create a new, scalable process that enforces a higher level of accountability.

Crack the whip on people all you want, but I think the Post’s system/process, or lack thereof, is failing the paper.

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…

Frustrated by the inability to do anything about the high cost of fuel or groceries and the egg-frying-on-the-sidewalk South Texas heat, let’s turn to something you and I have the ability to change for the better:
Making the San Antonio Express-News the most trusted, respected and accurate source of news and information in this region.
That high-minded language, by the way, is right out of the Preamble to our new Ethics and Practices policy.
One way to gain respect and credibility is to admit it when you’ve done wrong. To that end, the Express-News publishes corrections on Page 2A, under a headline “Setting it straight,” Many of the corrections you see there are reported by readers…
Last year, the newspaper published 494 Setting it Straights, about 41 per month.
This year, through May, corrections are down by an average of 10 per month. In only one month, January, have Setting it Straights even hit the 40 mark. But it’s early. Last Thursday we published eight corrections on 2A, the most in a long spell.
And while we ran nearly 500 Setting it straights in 2007 and are closing in on 200 so far this year, that’s not to say that journalists here – or South Texas readers – catch or admit every error…
The Express-News has long held that corrections shouldn’t repeat the error. For example, don’t say: “The Missions beat Frisco, 3-1, Saturday night, not, 3-2, as was reported on Page 10C of Sports on Sunday.” Instead, say: “The Missions’ score, as reported on Page 10C Sunday, was incorrect. The Missions won, 3-1.
The new ethics code allows for flexibility in writing corrections, designed to clarify mistakes for readers, rather than leave them wondering what was wrong…

Unfortunately, many media outlets fail this test. Just have a look at these corrections. Too many corrections are vague, confusing, or downright frustrating. What was incorrect? How did it happen? What article are you talking about? Fortunately, Vaden brings word of changes at the News & Observer. (He also very kindly makes reference to my book.)

Linda Williams, N&O senior editor who oversees corrections, says relief is at hand. “There was a sort of format that discouraged people from restating the error,” she said. “We’re changing that whole idea and trying to write corrections that make it clear what was wrong and what is correct.”

Williams said the paper also is doing more staff training to prevent errors and encouraging readers to alert the paper to errors. There is an e-mail address — accuracy@newsobserver.com — to send notice of errors, and the paper has started a computer database of errors to better identify how they occur and can be prevented.

All encouraging steps.

Maybe it’s working. The N&O in 2007 printed 553 corrections, reversing a three-year upward trend that reached 680 in 2006. “I hope the reason we’re having fewer errors is that we’re doing a better job of prevention,” Williams said. But she’s also concerned about the impact of recent staff losses of copy editors and design editors, who are the last defense in catching mistakes.

“You can do a lot of training to prevent people from making errors,” she said. “But a lot of errors are caught because you’re reading a proof and it jumps out on the page when you see it. My concern is that we won’t have the time to do that last step when someone looks at it and catches it on the page.”

The paper did manage to reduce corrections despite having fewer people last year. Let’s hope that continues.

It good to see the paper is working on improving quality even in the face of staff losses. Many outlets are  dealing with shrunken newsrooms and it’s all too easy to let accuracy slide down the priority list. Just have a look at this recent example.

…In 2007, the Star has published 497 corrections, up to and including today.
That’s slightly less than last year’s final tally of 512 and considerably less than many major metropolitan newspapers, including The New York Times, which logged 3,600 corrections in its computerized corrections tracker this year.
The Guardian in Britain usually publishes six corrections a day, six days a week – about 1,800 annually. Among this year’s is one worthy of inclusion in a Corrections Hall of Shame: “We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 30.”
I’ve written corrections for the Star that have made me cringe.
Last month, an article reported on the tasering incident involving Vancouver police. Of course, the RCMP was involved in the incident at the Vancouver airport, a fact the Vancouver police force was quick to point out in requesting a correction.
Other corrections made me laugh out loud at the silliness of our mistakes. One of my favourites: a Nov. 19 article about a new study indicating that Detroit is the most dangerous U.S. city incorrectly stated that Detroit has seen nearly one million people killed since 1950.
In fact, that number represents the overall decline in Detroit’s population since 1950, not the number of people killed. As numerous readers pointed out, one million killed since 1950 would amount to 48 deaths a day. That one was picked up and published by the popular newspaper error website Regret the Error, under the headline The Detroit massacre.
Speaking of which, the Star did in fact kill a couple of well-known people by mistake, a practice known as “obiticide,” or death by media. A Nov. 23 item about actors from the 1960s’ TV series Hogan’s Heroes incorrectly listed Richard Dawson as deceased. In March, an article about Canada’s Walk of Fame inductees incorrectly referred to “the late Morley Safer.” In fact, as our correction noted, Safer is alive and continues to file stories as a 60 Minutes correspondent.
How do these errors happen within a newsroom in which great care is taken in writing, editing and proofreading? Sometimes, it’s because of what journalists have come to label “brain cramp” – we know better, but still we goof. Sometimes, it’s carelessness and the rush to deadline. Always, it’s because those who produce this newspaper are human, and a perfect human – let alone a perfect journalist – has yet to evolve.
Still, it’s important that the Star is accountable to our readers for its errors and, more so, that we learn from our mistakes. That’s why, in coming weeks, my office will launch our own “accuracy tracker,” a computer database that will track newsroom errors and corrections and the reasons why these mistakes occur to help the newsroom identify preventative measures…

Those words were written by Orlando Sentinel public editor Manning Pynn in an important column published on Sunday. (Romenesko spotted it.)

Pynn was moved to write the column after noticing a spike in the number of corrections over recent months. “In the past three months, the newspaper has corrected more than a third more errors of its own making on average than it did during the relatively placid prior five months,” writes Pynn.

Even more alarmingly, those same three months “have accounted, thus far, for significantly more corrections of internally generated errors than the newspaper averaged in that three-month period during the prior five years. I’d have waited until the end of the month to raise this frightening issue, but with several days left before Halloween, and several more corrections awaiting publication, the total for October already has surpassed that of September — which was worse than August.”

Something is causing errors, and therefore corrections, to spike at the Sentinel. Pynn points to recent job cuts at the paper:

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.

It has been widely, obsessively reported that the newspaper industry is in a time of evolution and turmoil. Many of the changes taking place are fascinating and exciting, but change is coming at a price. It usually does. As newsrooms shift resources to online reporting and other areas of growth and innovation, many organizations are either laying off or buying out staff.

Head counts are going down; yet there is at the same time a need for even more reporting to be produced for more areas: writing for the web, video and audio for the web, writing for the paper… As the economic picture becomes more clear, it’s likely that staff levels will once again rise. We are already seeing ads for remarkably new kinds of jobs in journalism.

But there is an urgent issue in the present: how can an organization ensure the quality of its reporting with less people in the newsroom? In the case of the Sentinel, it appears that the paper is struggling to maintain quality after recent staff losses. As Pynn points out, many of those who left the paper were skilled veterans responsible for quality. It’s not the only paper in this situation. Hopefully, Pynn’s column will help the paper realize the danger of degraded quality and work to ensure accuracy in the midst of challenges.

It can be done, and this issue is as much about the future as it is the present. If a newsroom loses a wealth of error-spotters, checkers and other quality hounds, it needs to begin training everyone — not just a select few — in the ways of accuracy. Reporters should be trained to self-check their work. They need to learn their weaknesses and be given a quick, easy procedure to go through before submitting any story. (Some publications use checklists.)

Editors should be armed with information about common errors so they can check for them within every story. All employees should be taught the value of error prevention, and the ethic of correction. Technology should be used to help check for plagiarism, and to track errors.

Everyone at every level in every section is responsible for accuracy. We have to move away from a culture and organizational structure where only some carry the quality mantle on a daily basis. It’s everyone’s job. We need to train people and give them the necessary tools and support. And it has to be done on a consistent basis. Words and slogans are not enough.

“Every business’ success depends on the reliability of its products or services,” writes Pynn. “If their reliability declines, people are less likely to buy them. Newspapers are particularly susceptible to that phenomenon.”

Other industries have taken the concept of quality to new heights. They obsess about the quality of their products and innovate ways to ensure it.

The current period of transition in the news industry is the perfect time to start a quality revolution in reporting.

Check Your Facts has learned that the New York Times may finally be making good on one of the recommendations laid out in a 2005 report titled “Preserving Our Readers’ Trust.”
Fresh from a “training class,” a well-placed source at the Times says a computerized tracking system for corrections is being implemented. Correspondent Adam Klasfeld learned of the new system through correspondence with a New York Times editor (Check Your Facts is withholding the editor’s name in order to maintain open communications on the matter). The NYT editor said that no tracking system as described in the report currently exists but that a “training class” was held for a new system. “We are just implementing it,” wrote the editor. “We are beginning with corrections on October 1.”

We reported on the roll out of the system in December of last year after speaking with Greg Brock, the paper’s corrections editor:

A final note from the Times: Brock says the paper does have a corrections database that is being used by some departments. Each department can see its own corrections tally, and Brock has access to the total data. He says they are working to roll it out within all departments. This database was one of the recommendations of the Siegal Committee. It’s good to see the paper following up on this project. We hope it’s fully operational ASAP.

In an email response this week, Brock said the system was fully operational as of September 17. “So it is in place, though we are continuing to train editors who will use it only occasionally because they work on sections or special issues of magazines that publish just a few times a year,” he wrote. “The main news desks are already using it.”

We asked if the paper plans to release its tallies the way some other paper do (see these links: 1, 2, 3, 4), and Brock said the issue hadn’t yet been raised, but that he would look into it. As of now, he is distributing reports to the relevant editors on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis in order to show them the most common types of errors in their sections. It’s good to hear the data is being put to use to help fuel preventative initiatives.