Finding last second mistakes will cost you at this paper

Once upon a time, I accidentally flip-flopped the identity of two players in a sports photo. SE ran the correction the next day starting with "because of a copy desk error......". That got my blood boiling as I explained how many reporters and photographers errors I found and fixed without so much as a comment and that the paper would be a joke without my bailing out the rest of the staff on grammar and the like.

You win as a team and you lose as a team. Just run the correction with no need to assign blame.

 

It's not a blame thing per se. It's a subtle, and effective, and official, way to point out that the reporter, whose credibility in the community might be at stake here, did not make the actual mistake.

You have to salvage the reporter's credibility in that case. You have to.

 

Riptide nailed it. We all make mistakes, but the reporter is the one who has to go out into the community.

 

Yep. Exactly right.

 

I've had a boss throw me under the bus in print for an editing mistake once.

 

What is this "ordinary editing" the memo mentions? Didn't that get laid off?

 

My long-time former employer used a similar format for corrections for the final 10 years or so of my career there. In fact, if anything, it was even more personal: "Because of a copy editor's/reporter's/photographer's error ..." The offending person had to fill out a form providing a detailed explanation of what happened. If somebody simply wrote, "I screwed up," it wouldn't be acceptable and would be kicked back to that person for a rewrite.

We were always told that these corrections didn't go into a red file and didn't factor into raises and demotions, but nobody believed it. I learned the truth when it came time to do a copy editor's annual evaluation and my boss told me, "Be sure to mention that he's busted 12 headlines in the last year." I did not do so in the evaluation and never heard about it, but who knows what happened further up the food chain.

 

That does play into the old lament that folks only see the mistakes the copy editor missed. Not the hundreds he's caught.

Once had a reporter so incompetent she'd get the score wrong more often than not. That was a disaster waiting to happen and every time I edited her story I worried being called into the principal's office for not catching a mistake.

 

Once had an intern who asked who Norman Greg is.

And this was during our Masters coverage, of course.

 

Our boss is critical of us if someone makes a sports mistake in different section of the paper. ???

 

Copy editors are the long snappers of the journalism world.

 

How the hell could you get away with something like that? Wouldn't he see the replate and be furious. And in the end, he's the boss. Pretty unprofessional