Daily Star owns up to mistakes

Sam Pollak

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January 6, 2007

Daily Star owns up to mistakes

Anonymous The Daily Star Sat May 15, 2010, 02:32 AM EDT

Sam Pollak

Newspaper editors _ as all who know us would surely attest _ are the most affable and delightful members of the human race.

But each day, we all have one interlude when our angelic faces are _ like Hamlet's _ sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

This daily ordeal occurs precisely at the moment of our first glance at our own newspaper.

While our readers are eagerly and happily ingesting the news we present, the editor's noble heart aches as if beset with one of those thousand natural shocks that made Hamlet so moody.

That's because we always see things we should have done better. If we're fortunate, they're mere newspaper style offenses unlikely to cause outraged mobs with pitchforks and torches to storm the newspaper office gates.

Then, of course, there are those huge, sickening mistakes that make us wish we had gone into another line of work. Commit enough of them, of course, and we will be in another line of work.

I can't speak for all editors, of course, but I doubt you would find any who would claim to have put out even one perfect newspaper.

I certainly haven't, and that's with being blessed with co-workers whose talent is only surpassed by their dedication.

There's this wonderful anecdote about Gene Roberts, who was regarded by many journalists as the premier editor in the country when he headed up the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s and '80s.

The story, told by James M. Naughton and related in a column a few years ago by his Poynter Institute colleague Bob Andelman, concerned Roberts and a fellow who was about to retire from the Inquirer.

Sometimes, when people retire, they're given a plaque or silver tray with some vague platitudes on it to show them how much they will be missed.

After some thought about what to have engraved on this particular tray, Naughton told Roberts that it would focus on the retiree's contributions that "helped to create an excellent newspaper."

Naughton said he thought no more about it until getting woken up the next morning at 7:30 by a phone call from Roberts, who hadn't gone to bed until 3 a.m.

"I've been thinking about this tribute," Roberts said, "and I just can't say that about the paper."

Under Roberts' leadership, the Inquirer won 17 Pulitzer Prizes in 18 years, and he couldn't bring himself to claim excellence ... on a tray that would just wind up on somebody's mantel or coffee table.

Now, there was an editor.

In 2006, The Daily Star ran 202 corrections. That was 47 more than in 2005. Of course, we made hundreds more mistakes that were never brought to our attention, and we violated rules of grammar and punctuation more times than I like to think about.

Moreover, we made many errors of omission ... but not one of volition. We try our best to get things right, and we succeed far more often than we fail.

That we ran more corrections in 2006 than in the previous year doesn't bother me. Maybe we're doing a better job of policing ourselves and encouraging folks to let us know when we make a mistake.

And truth be told, we'll probably run more corrections this year than last. The Daily Star is no longer just a newspaper. We're an Internet website, an outlet for video news, and a full-fledged communications company.

The exciting opportunity to quickly present breaking news on the Internet comes with the reality of shorter, more-urgent deadlines and less time to fully process stories.

We'll try hard to keep up, but inevitably, there will be errors. We'll own up to every one we find out about, just as we do now.

Here are my two favorite Daily Star corrections from 2006:

Back in May, Sports Editor Dean Russin discovered that a part-time clerk _ now understandably a former part-time clerk _ was embarrassingly careless. To his great credit. Dean wrote this correction above the listings of 17 names:

The following high school athletes' names were misspelled in Tuesday's editions of The Daily Star because of a combination of reporters' errors, editors' errors, incorrect information provided by coaches and carelessness.

Even the national wire services are not immune. Here's a correction we ran in early March:

In obituaries Feb. 25 and Feb. 26 for actor Don Knotts, The Associated Press reported erroneously that "The Andy Griffith Show" character Deputy Barney Fife carried just one bullet, in his shirt pocket, after shooting himself in the foot. The character was accident-prone, but never shot himself.

In 2007, we at The Daily Star will do our very best, and like Barney, try very hard not to shoot ourselves in the foot in the process.

___

Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.