It was extremely fitting that Craig Silverman, founder of the “Regret the Error” blog and a mini-journalism celebrity, was a guest, via Skype, with Ohio University’s chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists this week.
Silverman has made his mark calling out inaccuracies, factual errors and the failure to correct those errors among members of the media for years. I, and the bulk of professional and student journalists, follow his blog closely and pray that our names and publications never grace it.
It’s not that we don’t all make mistakes. In fact, I’ll personally take the blame for tons of the mistakes that appear in these pages each week.
That time we ran the wrong headshot of Athens County Commissioner Mark Sullivan — I should have caught it. That time we misspelled Justin Bieber’s (pop music superstar and my celebrity crush) last name in the headline for one of my columns — I didn’t write the headline, but sleepily signed off on it without catching the typo. That time we swapped “their” for “they’re” in a sports headline — well, actually I had nothing to do with that one, but you get the point.
But no matter how witty of an excuse, the fact of the matter is, there is no excuse for letting factual, grammatical and other slip ups into the pages of The Post. In fact, in the three days we’ve had our current readership survey online, there has been no more uniform feedback than for the desire to limit the number of errors that make their way into our product each day.
We hear you.
There’s certainly nothing more frustrating than waking up in the morning and spotting a mistake in the paper. It not only devalues the hard work put into that article, headline or graphic, but it also hurts the paper’s long-term credibility. And, believe it or not, we’ve rolled out a series of new fact-checking measures throughout the course of the year to try to cut down on the number of ugly mistakes that infiltrate our copy.
Our copy chief, John Nero, has completely overhauled our “late-night” system so that more of the content is being read earlier in the night by eyes that are a little less exhausted. Meanwhile, we’ve added a step to editing — in past years, most articles were only edited for content and fact checked once (in addition to being copy edited); now, two section editors are responsible for editing and fact checking each piece.
Those changes have ushered in improvement. Things still aren’t where we’d like them, but this year has seen the fewest number of factual corrections of any year during my time at The Post.
Meanwhile we’ve rolled out a new blog: “Oops, We Did It Again,” where we own up to each mistake and give a quick explanation of what was wrong and how it got past us. As a publication dedicated to accuracy, we want to own up to our mistakes which, as a student publication, can at times be quite frequent.
As always, let us know when you catch something off in the pages of The Post, because there’s no worse mistake than one that goes uncorrected. We’re not putting our red pens away, and we hope you don’t either.
Wesley Lowery is a senior studying journalism and the editor-in-chief for The Post. If you find any mistakes, email him at wl372808@ohiou.edu.
