Newspaper Miscorrection

You know, Grant, talking about newspaper corrections, I’m struck lately that more and more of them tend to have a little more human touch to them.

They’re not so officious as they used to be.

And I think maybe that’s because newspapers tend to be more accessible on the Internet now.

There was one that ran recently in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

And it had to do with a mistaken book title.

And it goes, leave it to a middle school librarian to catch us.

Those people notice everything.

We recently praised the Hunger Games trilogy in this column.

We liked it so much that we got the name of the second book wrong.

Of course it’s catching fire, not whatever we said last week.

Imagine holding a book all those hours and then getting the title wrong.

In the statewide newspaper.

That takes some doing.

It’s like covering a football game and screwing up the final score.

Thank you to our loyal, literate, and observant readers for keeping us straight.

It can’t be easy.

I wonder if there’s going to be a trend that people give more humane corrections.

Well, one thing that newspapers have started doing, at least recently when I worked in newspapers, was making corrections an actual part of the paper.

Oh, yeah.

Actually drawing attention to them so that it’s like not just hidden among the classifieds or buried someplace where you wouldn’t find it, but actually making a deal out of it, assigning a columnist to it, having the columnist research what happened, and making a story out of the mistake.

Yeah, and it’s great that so much is online now and it gets corrected right then and there.

But there’s still the problem of the old guard not, for example, wanting to run corrections at all or burying the corrections or insisting that they didn’t do anything wrong or that it’s not worth correcting a name.

I think if you’ve got a name wrong, you correct it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Condoleezza would agree with you on that.

Yes. 877-929-9673.