My colleague Greg Brock reports that of about 2,800 errors we’ve corrected in print so far this year, 460 have involved people’s names. And every time we get a name wrong, we chip away at The Times’s credibility in the eyes of readers. It’s embarrassing when we misspell well-known names. Even worse is misspelling the names of ordinary people who may appear in The Times only once. Their moment in the spotlight is spoiled, and they’re likely to tell everyone they know that The Times can’t get its facts straight.

And now for the Times tips:

• In every interview, ask the subject to spell his or her name.
• If you use another source, online or elsewhere, be sure it’s reliable. (Don’t take a Google poll and go with the spelling that gets the most hits.)
• Don’t just check how we spelled the name last time — our archive is, among other things, a minefield of past errors.
• Copy editors should check as many names as humanly possible.
• If you couldn’t double-check before the first deadline, do it afterward.
• Be wary of names with common variants — Stephen and Steven, O’Neil and O’Neill and O’Neal.
• Don’t rely on memory.

Good advice.

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!

Accuracy is fundamental to what we do, but it’s a challenge to verify information when it flows at digital warp speed from so many sources. Get specific tools, advice and strategies to master the art of online verification. Learn how to verify a tweet, evaluate if a website is credible and check the accuracy of your own work.

The good news is that a lot of ONA is live streamed and there will be tons of people tweeting details from the workshops, too. So check today for a live stream, and also be sure to follow #ONA11 and #bsdetection on Twitter.

Even better than all that, I’ve embedded our slides below. We decided to include a lot of our tips and lessons on the slides, so you can learn a lot just by clicking through and reading.

Enjoy!

Update September 26, 2011: I heard from a couple of people that our Additional Reading links on the last slide aren’t clickable. Here they are for you:

• Best practices for social media verification
• Accuracy and accountability checklist for social media
  
• The journalist’s guide to gutless online verification
• The human algorithm
• BBC processes for verifying social media content
• Meet Andy Carvin, verification machine
• The challenge of verifying crowdsourced information
• Resources to help journalists with accuracy and verification

Update Oct. 19, 2011: Here’s the full video of our session:

… In the field of corrections as anywhere else, “openness” isn’t binary — it has gradations and nuances. I like to imagine these as a sort of ladder of transparency that news organizations need to climb.

On the first rung of this ladder, journalists readily fix mistakes they learn about and conscientiously disclose and record the details of each fix. (Most newsrooms declare allegiance to this ideal but, sadly, our MediaBugs research shows, the majority still fail to live up to it.)

One rung up, news outlets effectively solicit error reports from their audiences, making it clear that they welcome the feedback and will respond. The Report an Error Alliance is trying to push more news organizations to climb up here.

On the next rung up, newsrooms also willingly expose their own internal deliberations over particular controversies, explaining why they did or didn’t correct some issue readers raised and leaving some sort of public trail of the decision. At some publications, the ombudsman or public editor takes care of some of this.

On the final, topmost rung, the news organization will assure accountability by turning to a neutral third party to maintain a fair record of issues raised by the public. This shows external critics that the newsroom isn’t hiding anything or trying to shove problems under the rug…

Kevin Bottrell is the editor of the Colby Free Press, a daily newspaper in Colby, Kansas.

"I've never written out a checklist for my newsroom, but your stories got me thinking and I do have one I run through every day, I've just never articulated it," he writes. "I quickly realized I need about three different checklists because there are three different areas to my job: writing, editing and proofing pages. I could add a fourth for page design, but I really do that in a more seat-of-the-pants fashion to keep my designs from being stagnant."

Here's his checklist, which covers three core areas for newspapers. He says he'll post it in the newsroom. Way to set a good example, Kevin!

Michael Moon is the journalism advisor at Kinston High School in North Carolina. He uses the below checklist in the journalism course he teaches. Nice job starting kids off with early checklists, Michael! This is a good one:

Amanda McAlpine is the arts and culture editor of the Campus student newspaper at Bishop's University in Canada. She recently saw me speak about accuracy and checklists at a conference held by the Canadian University Press. Now she's created her own checklist, and wrote to say that she's going to get her writers to create checklists, too. Great!

Her checklist is below. Also note that I sent her this after taking a quick look at it: "One piece of feedback is that there are lots of factual items that are used again and again in arts and cultural coverage, and you may want to add those to the final checks before submission section: album title, show name, ticket price, etc. They could go along with 'time and date of upcoming show' etc. But great to see you customized it."

Today's journalist checklist is a little bit different than the others I've shared. Mandy Jenkins is a social media producer for TBD.com, and she's one of the top folks currently filling that role at a news organization. So perhaps it's not surprising that she has come up with a checklist for social media. This is a fantastic addition to the world of checklists. From the post with her checklist:

In the rapid-fire world of social media, it’s easy for a journalist or news organization to make mistakes. Sometimes, these things happen in the heat of the moment, but more often than not the errors seem to stem from a widespread belief amongst journalists that Twitter carries less need for accuracy and accountability than the full-story medium. Recent events have told us otherwise.

I believe there is an ever-increasing need for accuracy and accountability in how we as journalists use social media.

Be sure to read her full post and tell her if you have any additions to the checklist. Here it is:

Emma Jacobs is a radio reporter with WKSG in Ithaca, NY. "My hangups are a little unusual because I'm reporting for radio first and then for web," she said. "A lot of one man band mistakes of omission. The on-the-spot trick is to remember to get stuff like [spelling and] pronunciation on your tape." She's the first broadcast reporter to send in a checklist, and here are her items:

Interview: name & title (spelling)

                Preferred contact info for follow-ups

                Ask what mistakes have been made on story

Recording – Pronunciation

Numbers – double check

                Refind in reports (link in notes)

Language revisions & spelling of web script

Check audio – transcripts of clips

Here's a picture of her checklist:

Madeleine Cummings is a student journalist for the McGill Daily at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She recently saw me speak about errors, accuracy and checklists at the National Conference of the Canadian University Press. She then went home and put together the below checklist.

Cummings altered my checklist "to fit with the types of articles I'm usually assigned at the Daily. Clarifying hometowns is a big one for me — my name has definitely been spelled wrong many times, but seeing my hometown written as 'Peterborough' instead of 'Toronto' was awful! Often it can get confusing with young musicians who move from smaller rural places to big cities…"

Her checklist:

Lisa McLendon is the deputy copy desk chief at the Wichita Eagle. (She's also the vice president of conferences for the American Copy Editors Society.) When she was the head of the copy desk at the Denton (Texas) Record-Chronicle, she used the below checklist.

"Every cover proof got one of these attached to it," she said. "I think it cut down on picky mistakes, because we had to stop and pay attention to all the little things."

Yes indeed!

Eric Borer is the journalism assistant at the University of La Verne in Southern California. He's also the production manager and the business manager for the school's newspaper, the Campus Times. He got in touch to say the Times newsroom has long been using accuracy checklists to help with production and reporting.

"We have two checklists we use in the newsroom," he said. "One is a pretty no frills post-production/pre-flight checklist that we’ve been using for a long time – at least a dozen years or so. It was originally created by a former faculty adviser, but it’s been updated and tweaked a few times since then … For each issue, I generate one of those checklists for each page of our print edition. Completing the checklist is the student editor’s last step before finishing each page and putting it to bed."

Their second checklist is for student reporters. Borer said students have to use that checklist when they complete each draft.

"We’ve found both checklists to be a big help, particularly the production checklist," he said. "I’ve lost count of how many significant errors have made it all the way through our editing and production process, only to be stopped by that checklist. (In fact, that checklist itself owes its origin to a benign, but very embarrassing, error that made its way onto our front page once."

There you go: yet another testimonial to the value of checklists. Here's the story checklist, and the production checklist is below that:

John X. Miller is editor of the Hickory Daily Record and previously served as public editor of the Detroit Free Press. In addition to providing several sample checklists, he also offered one of the best testimonials I've seen on behalf of newsroom checklists.

"When I was public editor at the Detroit Free Press from 1999 through 2007, we created and used accuracy checklist extensively, and we had data that demonstrated that they worked in lowering errors, specifically recurring errors, with numbers (like phone numbers), odd names (like the Detroit Chamber, not Detroit Chamber of Commerce), misspellings and misidentifications," he wrote in an email. "We created them for every functional job in the newsroom, and the way we produced them (folding cards to be placed on desks in front of people or perforated to be cut apart), demonstrated how newsroom accuracy is an integrated process that involves acknowledgement of everyone's role in the process"

The Free Press created several checklists, one for each role in the process. I've embedded them below. Along with looking at those examples, I encourage you to read the column Miller wrote about checklists. It's important because he provides hard data about the efficacy of checklists:

In the first six months of 2001, the Free Press averaged 44 corrections each month, with the most errors in June — 53. The monthly average for the last five months, July through November, is 31.

In July, we had 25 corrections, more than a 53-percent decrease from the high number in June. Overall, the July-November number of corrections is 30 percent lower than the first half of the year.

I've had people ask me for data about checklists, so there you go. His column also addressed the limitations of checklists:

One way we check to see whether people use the checklists — and reinforce that they can work if used — is to ask if using them could have kept a mistake from being made in the first place. We ask that question, among others, on correction forms that people who are responsible for the error must fill out.

The one area that hasn’t been helped by checklists is errors in fact that are not categorized as misidentifications, misspellings, addresses and mistakes with numbers. These account generally for 44 percent of all corrections. These are errors such as a headline that disagrees with what’s in a story, or saying anthrax is caused by a virus when it’s caused by bacteria.

The document he sent with the checklists included an interesting preamble, which I've excerpted:

We decided on what errors to target by examining the error pattern over the last couple of years, talking with and getting buy-in from staff and experimenting with the checklists. The goal of these accuracy checklists is to remind newsroom journalists, especially on deadline, to verify and re-verify certain information and to help make sure stories, photos and graphics are contextual and work together.

We designed the checklists to cover the key newsroom roles of reporter, assigning editor, copy editor, photographer, photo editor, page designer and artist. The 8 checklists are written in the active voice and are as concise as possible, and are made into a laminated 2-sided card that can be folded to sit atop a desk or computer, or to be cut apart for lists to be used separately.

As far as the Free Press’ accuracy focus, accuracy and fairness are the top newsroom- wide goals. Being accurate is one of the most important responsibilities of today’s journalists. It’s a core value that is fundamental to all that we do. It affirms a newspaper’s credibility, authority and accuracy. Readers expect journalists to get information right and when we don’t get routine information correct, it has a cumulative negative affect on credibility.

And now for the checklists:

Wendy Stonecash is the Data Center Supervisor/Newsroom Administrator for the Palladium-Item in Richmond, Indiana. She uses the below checklist to make sure all of the important parts of an obituary are taken care of prior to publication. Note how many items are here — and therefore how many things can go wrong.

Wendy's checklist:

Sean F. Driscoll is a reporter with the Rockford Register Star in Rockford, Illinois. He sent me a photo of a checklist that he keeps taped to the side of his computer monitor. "It’s simple, but it’s up right where I can see it, and it hits all the high points of things to check," he said.

Simple is good, Sean!

I love that his checklist includes the commands to "Walk away" and "Print story." Both of those steps are essential for me when I'm in the final stages of self-editing and checking. I encourage all of you to add them to your checklists.

Here's Sean's checklist, and his book is shipping soon: