VITAMEDIAS
Coming clean on the error of our ways: Margaret Holt, whose formal title at the [Chicago] Tribune is customer service editor and whose duties include keeping and analyzing records of our errors, is doing her year-end analysis for 2002, and preliminary data offer reasons both for alarm and for optimism. Among the findings:
- We committed a total 691 errors last year, resulting in the publication of 678 "corrections and clarifications" in the space reserved for that purpose each day on Page 2. (Under the Tribune's formal policy, a misstatement of fact--spelling someone's name wrong, getting a game score incorrect, giving the wrong phone number for a movie theater, describing as dead someone who is alive--qualifies as an error. Grammatical or typographical mistakes or differences of interpretation do not. Each time an error is discovered, the desk from which it originated is required to submit to the public editor's office a report describing how it happened and how it might have been prevented.)
Last year's total of 691 - just under two a day - was up from 646 in 2001, which was up from 599 in 2000, our lowest total since the paper began formally tracking errors in the mid-1990s. Part of Holt's analysis will be to seek reasons for these increases.
- Almost half of our errors - 49.64 percent - were news-gathering errors, committed at what Holt calls "the front end of the news process, when reporters are nailing down facts." That's important information, because it tells source desk editors they need to be extra vigilant in monitoring and directing their troops in the field.
- Only 32.28 percent of last year's errors were identified internally, as opposed to coming from outside the paper. That's worrisome because Holt's analyses have consistently found that overall numbers of errors go down as the percentage of those identified internally goes up, probably "because people are focused on accuracy as a priority."
[Ver, no mesmo sentido, a página de erros do New York Times] Corrections