Blunders, Gaffes and Terrible Math: When Copy Editors Make Mistakes

My job, simply speaking, is to get things right. So there is no worse feeling than the realization that you have entered a correctable error into print and that a correction will appear a day or two later to proclaim, “Because of an editing error …” There is no escaping the page of the newspaper that you have marred; it reappears everywhere you look: blowing down the sidewalk, on a subway car, wrapped around the sea bass you’ve just bought at the market. There is no doubt that five years from now, I’ll buy something on eBay and it will come in a box padded with a scrap of The New York Times that says “Tom Udall of Utah.”

So how does this happen? In many wonderful and colorful ways. In this case, I’m pretty sure I typed “Udall” and then typed “Utah” because of the alliterative assonance. The brain plays funny tricks like that. You can be absent-minded: I have typed the first names of friends who have the same last name of the person I was actually writing about. Or you can simply be lazy: I misspelled both “Micheal Jordan” and “Wayne Gretsky” … in the same headline.

The Times has strict policies on corrections: If it’s wrong, even if just for a few minutes online or in one edition of the print newspaper, it is supposed to get a correction. Reporters and editors are expected to self-report their mistakes, which can make you feel a little like Bart Simpson writing on the blackboard, “I will never misquote Shakespeare again.” But it is this dedication to accuracy that earns the trust of our readers.

The Corrections listings are one of the first things I read every day, and that is a common practice among many copy editors. It’s not necessarily an act of schadenfreude (but maybe a little) as much as it’s a daily reminder of the importance of diligence: Double-check your math. Look up even the most famous of quotations.

Reading through New York Times corrections is like taking a guided tour of journalism’s pitfalls. It’s where you discover the Ginsberg-Ginsburg Vortex, a black hole that has devoured many a journalist who has confused the names of the poet and the justice. And it’s a parallel universe in which former Secretary of State George P. Shultz has a “c” in his last name, and the Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz has a “t.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/insider/editor-errors-corrections.html