Windsor (Ontario) Star "apologizes without reservation" for error

"The directors of the firm hired to
continue the credits after the other
people had been sacked, wish it to
be known that they have just been
sacked.
The credits have been completed
in an entirely different style at
great expense and at the last
minute."

 

That's the answer along with getting more experienced reporters.

 

Once had a guy call the school for the deaf in town the school for the death. It was done in a story about 20-25 times. I was the man on design desk and asked if it had been read, and was told by someone it was. It wasn't. That was a fun day.

 

My former shop ran an info graphic with Fort Rucker very unfortunately misspelled. The humorous part is that the error occurred on a Saturday, so relatively few saw it, but the giant correction/apology ran on Sunday, so many who had no idea of what happened saw the correction. Then, they started wanting to know what happened.

 

But that doesn't approach this error. Yowzer.

Just thought of this, but isn't the first rule of correcting libelous info that you don't repeat the libel? Strange all around.

 

Yeah, I have wondered about that. Corrections are fine and good, but sometimes I think they actually call more attention to the mistake. In a paper of any size, you could probably find a handfull of mistakes every single day.

The ultimate for me was one person wanting us to run a correction on a high school golf score. Any idea how many scores we take over the phone every night? (It's gotten a little better thanks to email.) And we miss one digit on a golf score? To me, that was within the acceptable margin of error.

 

We once had a guy run a story saying a high school kid was out for the season with an injury. Turns out the injury was ... death in a car accident! He wrote a correction that made us look even more ridiculous and my boss refused to run it. Said we'd look even dumber than we already did. And the writer always wondered whey he couldn't get a fulltime job anywhere.

 

I literally lose sleep even over the little errors that are bound to slip through eventually at any paper, so those golf score things drive me nuts - not to mention seem to draw the most ire. It's never the mispelled D1 player's name that draws 10 phone calls, it's the JV bowler's family that howls.

Anyway, it haunts me that the few studies on this sort of thing I've heard about show something like 50-60 percent of all stories contain some kind of factual error. In a way, it's deeply discouraging to know how easy it is for human error to sneak in.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/regret-the-error/176273/new-study-shows-how-newspaper-inaccuracies-transcend-journalism-cultures-national-borders/