A new blog reader wants to know if it alarms me how many times we’re writing in this blog about mistakes in the paper. (The question wasn’t stated so politely, but the gist of it was that we seem to have no shortage of errors to write about.)
The short answer: Not a bit.
The longer answer: I can argue as well as anyone, and for every time I’ve written in this blog that we fell short in some way – I promise I could have made a credible argument instead for why we were right. But I don’t see the value in doing that.
Every day, we publish thousands of facts. We have to pick which to include in a story and which we can’t. We then summarize those facts in four to six words in a headline. And we do it on an inflexible deadline. We’re going to make mistakes.
But we do have to aspire to be perfect. I hate it when we get facts wrong. Or miss a typo. Or make a grammatical mistake. Or leave a fact out of a story that was critical to reader understanding, or balanced viewpoints. Or write a headline that misses the point of a story. I have a list that’s longer than the time you have to read this.
I make mistakes every day. Everyone does, whether they admit it or not. There’s no reason not to acknowledge mistakes and focus on figuring out how they happened, and learn from them.
I work with a talented news staff of people who are deeply committed to publishing a great community newspaper. We succeed far, far more than we fail. When we come up short, we owe it to our readers to say so.
I would be alarmed if I thought we were unwilling to do that.
Sherry