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“I thought the whole idea was for the corrections column to make me understand what was wrong in a story,” she said. “But I’ve read this one over several times and I went back to the original article, and I don’t understand what the problem was you were supposed to be setting straight.”
The correction, in the Nov. 20 paper, read: “An Across the Metro item in some Nov. 20 editions misidentified professor Christopher M. Sorenson. He works at Kansas State University.”
It took me a bit of time to see the error, too. I pointed my caller to the headline on the brief: “KU professor gets national honor.” Sorenson works for K-State, not KU.
“Well, I see it now,” she replied. “It would have been so much easier if the correction just said what the problem was. You know, ‘A headline said KU, and it was supposed to say K-State.’ I don’t think I would have been calling you then.”
The Star’s overall philosophy is not to restate the erroneous information in a correction, the reasoning being that it might cause more confusion in readers’ minds to see the bad information, even while it’s being refuted.
I think that makes sense in general. For example, why would the paper reprint a misspelling of a name, only to say that it’s wrong? You can easily imagine how restating that kind of error could perpetuate the mistake.
But the policy sometimes makes for a contorted or overly general correction, which can be confusing in itself. Take this example from Sept 27: “A Sept. 26 story about obscenity indictments in Johnson County should have said a grand jury can be extended 90 days, for a total of 180.”
I suppose a reader could find the story and suss out what the correction references, but I think that requires a bit too much work. The correction should at least have told readers that the original article gave the wrong number of days that a grand jury can operate.
There are some times when it would be extremely difficult to communicate the error without summing up the bad information, as in a Nov. 14 correction stating that a story two days before incorrectly said a man had been wounded in a shooting incident that he wasn’t actually involved in at all.
The Star doesn’t normally describe how the mistake happened these days. Several years ago, the policy dictated that corrections include a small explanation, such as “because of a reporter’s error,” or “because of incorrect information from a source.”
Editors decided that this type of clarification sometimes sounds defensive, especially when it lays the blame on a source outside the paper. I agree with the decision in those cases.
There are still times when a correction needs that extra bit of information, though, such as when The Star accidentally introduced a mistake into a letter to the editor. In that case, noting the editing mistake prevented the letter writer from undue embarrassment.
Speaking of corrections, the count this year is at 451 compared with 550 this time last year. That’s a good trend — and one that I’m sure readers would like to see continue.
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