Regret the Error

NY Times changes corrections policy (sorta)

Back in late September, the public editor of the New York Times, Daniel Okrent, called upon the paper to change the way it handles corrections.

Thanks to the perceptive folks over at Editor and Publisher, it appears the Times has heeded Okrent's call. Here is an excerpt from the E&P story:

Starting Friday, the corrections, which can number a dozen or more on some days, will be split into two groups, as Public Editor Daniel Okrent suggested in his column last Sunday, as a way to give more prominence to important foul-ups.
"Substantive errors," the editors said, will continue to fall under the Corrections heading. These are mistakes that "have materially affected the reader's understanding of a news development."
Narrower errors involving, for example, spellings, dates, or historical references, will appear under the heading, "For the Record."
This change, the editors explained, was "prompted by readers' suggestions" and was most recently highlighted by the Okrent column.

It should be noted, however, that this solution is not exactly in line with what Okrent called for. He wrote: "Let Editors' Notes remain Editors' Notes, let Corrections remain Corrections -- but give substantive (if innocent) errors their own place on the page, under their own heading. I haven't any idea what to call this new format I'm recommending, so let's kick off Public Editor Readership Contest No. 1."

Rather than create a new section for "substantive errors" The Times seems to have instead split off the "narrower errors" to go in "For the Record." Okrent wanted a new section with a new heading to tell the story of larger errors. What he got instead was the same section for the same errors and nothing different about how "substantive" errors are treated. They still go in the same place, under the same heading. You'll just have to look elsewhere for smaller errors.

Getting paid by the Post to blow kisses at Cheney

The Washington Post steps up to the plate to correct an error. Oh yeah, and to admit it staged and paid for the whole darn thing:

"In the Oct. 17 Sunday Source, the 'Gatherings' story described a Republican barbecue held to watch a presidential debate. The item reported 'the possibly unprecedented occurrence of a young woman in a cowboy hat pretending to make out with a poster of Dick Cheney.' The item should have explained that the woman was asked to pose with the vice president's picture by the photographer working for The Washington Post. The woman also did not pretend to 'make out' with the picture; at the photographer's suggestion, she pretended to blow a kiss at it. The item should have explained that the party was hosted in response to a request from The Post, which discussed the decorations and recipes with the host and agreed to reimburse the cost of recipe ingredients."

Thank the lord we now know no one would willingly make out with an image of Dick Cheney.

Apology orgy

It was a weekend of apologies.

First, the spunky Boston Herald, which does its best to chide and needle the Boston Globe any chance it gets, had to force feed itself some humble pie after it ran graphic photos of Victoria Snelgrove, the Boston fan who was killed in post-game celebrations last week.

After the issue hit the streets, angry letters began pouring in. "Who made the decision to print today’s crime photos of Victoria Snelgrove in the Herald? I want to see their picture with their justification on the front page tomorrow. I also want to see they have been terminated," wrote one reader. Other readers called the decision to run the photos "reviling" "despicable" and "outrageous." The Herald has published over 100 letters here.

The Herald ran an apology on Saturday:

"Yesterday, we ran two very graphic photos that angered and upset many in our community,'' Editorial Director Ken Chandler said. "Our aim was to illustrate this terrible tragedy as comprehensively as possible and to prevent a repetition by portraying the harsh reality of what can happen when a crowd acts irresponsibly.
"It was never our intent to disrespect Victoria Snelgrove or her family," Chandler said. "In retrospect, the images of this unusually ugly incident were too graphic. I apologize to the Snelgroves and the community at large."

The Herald apology was written as a news story, not as an editorial. It carried a staff byline and the lead read, "The Boston Herald yesterday apologized for running explicit photos of an Emerson College student who was killed in the melee that followed the Red Sox' pennant victory." We're unaware of any press conference where the Herald apologized, so this story strangely makes it seem as though the apology happened the day before, when the story itself actually constitutes the apology. As strange as this all may seem, the story did contain some rather harsh quotes about the Herald:

"Running the front-page photograph of Snelgrove between the headlines "Go Sox!" and "Triumph and Tragedy," however, was "sensationalism and pandering at its worst,'" said Janet Fine, executive director of the Massachusetts Office for Victim Assistance.

Joining the apology fray was Daniel Okrent, the public editor of the New York Times. In his October 10 column, he wrote this:

"But before I turn over the podium, I do want you to know just how debased the level of discourse has become. When a reporter receives an e-mail message that says, ''I hope your kid gets his head blown off in a Republican war,'' a limit has been passed.
That's what a coward named Steve Schwenk, from San Francisco, wrote to national political correspondent Adam Nagourney several days ago because Nagourney wrote something Schwenk considered (if such a person is capable of consideration) pro-Bush."

His column from this week includes this apology:

"I published the name of the man who wrote to Nagourney for the same reason that newspapers publish the names of people who commit other grievous acts. The man who vandalizes a church, say, doesn't want his name in the paper either. But I don't think his wishes should protect him from public responsibility for what he has done.
Same goes for public editors: I was wrong to call the reader a coward; that was engaging in the same debased discourse that I condemn. I apologize."

We Crunked: Regret corrections

It's time again for the weekly file of our corrections and no-nos. Thanks to all of you with sharp eyes and a spell-checker (two things we obviously lack). We also offer special thanks to Wick, Bill, Vincent, Ken and Steve for catching our mistakes. Here we go:

--Our October 18 post, "Attribute my wife, please" included the sentence "...his marital status seems strange and our of place." It should have read "...out of place." It was corrected. We regret the error.

--Our October 20 post, "They were all wrong" contained the sentence" The lead Page One headline in The Post on October 7, "incorrectly attributed a quotation to Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. The statement, "We were almost all wrong," was made by Duelfer's predecessor, David Kay, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Jan. 28," according to the correction The Post ran."
As one perceptive reader, who also happens to be a Post copy editor, pointed out, the headline was dictated by the misattributed quote contained in the story. The sentence was therefore changed to read, "The story and its resulting Page One headline in The Post on October 7, “incorrectly attributed a quotation to Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq..." We regret the error.

--Our sidebar, "Newspaper Corrections" mistakenly contained two links to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. One was deleted. We regret the error.

--Our October 22 post, "Comic porn" contained several spelling mistakes: "because" "pornographer" and "included" we all misspelled. The words have been corrected. We regret the errors.

--Last but not least, Regret's editor made a mistake in his weekly "Explainer" column for Montreal's Hour magazine. As this mistake has given his editor immeasurable glee in light of the mission of this site, and in the interest of making our own errors known, we hereby note that the October 14 issue of Hour incorrectly stated that the tower on Montreal's Olympic Stadium was completed 20 years after the 1976 Olympics were held. It was in fact completed in 1987. A notice ran in this week's paper and Craig Silverman profoundly regrets the error.

Update: Prickly City porn

We'd like to thank Logan and Tom for helping us find the URL that comic strip Prickly City published earlier this week. (Check our original post.) As many of you may know by now, Prickly City published a strip on the 19th that included a web address that was unregistered at the time. But the URL was soon snapped up and redirected to a porn site. We placed a call for you folks to help us locate the original address and here it is: www.coyotepac.org. Wait! Before you click, be warned that it goes to a very nasty bestiality site.

For the record, those of you who still click on the link are officially sick.

"Judge Ito with the wet nose"

Back at the height of the Jayson Blair scandal, Slate's Jack Shafer wrote an interesting article about newspaper corrections, and focused in on how the New York Times handles them. The article tracks The Times' fixation with corrections back to the tenure of A.M. Rosenthal:

"[Rosenthal] launched an aggressive campaign in 1972 to detect, right, and highlight Times errors. The Times corrections culture nurtured by Rosenthal seems to revel in correcting every misspelling, transposed digit, historical inaccuracy, and boner. The Times so loves its fallibility that it authorized a collection of its wildest and most shameful errors in the book, Kill Duck Before Serving."

Shafer also raises an interesting point: a paper such as The Times has many more readers and faces much more scrutiny than other papers in the country, which could partially explain why its corrections page is so consistently well-populated. Readers of this site will see that larger publications such as The New York Times and Los Angeles Times tend to show up here more often. While it may give the impression that they are more error-prone, one should also take into account that they have many more eyes scanning the paper for errors, many more stories in their paper, and also pursue fairly transparent corrections policies. That said, they still make the mistakes. But it is possible that errors in smaller papers are more likely to go unnoticed -- or unacknowledged.

In his article, Shafer also selected a few of his favorites from the book of Times corrections. Click below to read them and others.

Oh snap!

A race for a US House of Representatives seat in Washington State has turned decidedly nasty, causing one writer to use a correction to masterful effect.

The background: The National Republican Congressional Committee put together an ad that attacks the deceased father of Don Barbieri, the Democrat candidate. His Republican challenger, Cathy McMorris, has thus far not spoken out against the ad. So editorial writer and columnist Patrick McGann of the Lewiston Morning Tribune in Idaho penned a column attacking her and the ad. At the end of the column, he appended this notice:

Correction
An Oct. 1 editorial referred to Washington state Rep. Cathy McMorris, R-Colville as a "classy candidate." This page regrets the error. -- P.M.

With a big thanks to Ryan, who originally found this gem and put it up on his blog.

Comic porn

This is perhaps the sexiest error we've seen yet. A comic strip, Prickly City, included a link to a URL that was unregistered at press time. But just a few hours after the strip appeared, an enterprising pornographer registered the site and promptly threw up some push-push content. It is made all the more scandalous because the comic strip in question "offers a conservative perspective on political and social events within an ongoing storyline," according to the UPS website. Editor and Publisher has the full scoop on it, and here's a correction notice that ran in The Chicago Tribune:

In Tuesday's, Wednesday's and today's preprinted Tempo sections, the comic strip "Prickly City" contains a Web address, or URL, that links to a pornographic site. In a statement released Wednesday, the strip's provider, Universal Press Syndicate, explained that at the time the strip was filed, the address was "fictional and satirical" and led to an unregistered site. "Regrettably," the statement continued, "this site was registered midday on Oct. 19 following its appearance in the strip that morning. This URL now leads to an adult Web site." The syndicate added that it is "reviewing its policy of running fictional and unregistered URLs within its content." Tomorrow's strip has been corrected to eliminate the Web address.

Anyone out there know what the URL was? Email us. For research, of course.

Correction Quickies

The Los Angeles Times accidentally redefines the idea of a low budget film:

“An article in the Sept. 17 Calendar section about "Gloomy Sunday" said the movie cost less than $200,000 to make. Its budget was $5.2 million.”

Canada’s Globe And Mail can’t recognize a former prime minister or, even worse, wrestler Bret Hart:

“A list accompanying an article yesterday about a CBC series on the top 10 greatest Canadians incorrectly identified several people: former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, former prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier; wrestler Bret Hart and First World War General Sir Arthur Currie.”

The Winnipeg Sun falls victim to inbreeding:

“A man charged with killing Trevor Sinclair was wrongly identified as the victim's brother by police in yesterday's Sun. Norman Lacasse is the brother of Sinclair's half-brother, say relatives of the murder victim.”

What about his other brother Darryl?

Why Johnny can't read

The Dallas Morning News made an illiterate out of songwriter John Bucchino the other day:

"An Oct. 19 article on songwriter John Bucchino incorrectly stated that he doesn't read. The sentence should have said he doesn't read music."

That's just great. What about all of us who bought tickets just to hear the music of an illiterate cabaret musician and songwriter? Do we get refunds?