Journalism transparency: owning up to mistakes

My professional mistakes haunt me.

I think about them nearly every day; at least the worst ones. They replay in my mind like a dripping faucet that can't be fixed.

When I was a sports reporter, working solo on the sports desk on a Wednesday night, I wrote a short, time-sensitive story involving the Southeast Missouri State University athletics program. I don't remember the specifics of the story, but I remember talking on the phone with then-athletic director Don Kaverman. I had read and reread the story numerous times. It would be the last time I would ever publish a story without some backup. It was a sloppy process, I learned the hard way. The last step was to run my copy through spell-check, when the story was on the page. I quickly clicked through the flagged words, hit save and moved on to other editing and layout work.

The next morning I read with horror that Southeast's athletic director was named Don Caveman. I had apparently clicked the wrong button on the spell-check and it changed all references of the official's last name. When I tell the story to others, it usually invokes a chuckle. But that error made me physically sick. I've had that feeling three or four times in my career.

Kaverman, when I apologized, was very gracious, which is usually the case when you make personal apologies like that one. Most of the time, people understand that humans make mistakes, and I think they can hear the regret in your voice when you make that call. Some 15 years later, I can't escape the lingering feeling of embarrassment.

I've been writing a lot about transparency lately. Frankly, my tone on transparency has bordered on righteousness, partly because I feel so strongly that transparency is a bedrock principle to a free society, and partly because I strongly believe many government bodies are trying very hard to not be transparent.

But last week we had to swallow a mistake, and it's worth pointing out that there is another side to transparency. Media organizations need to have access to information, but we need the trust of our sources and readers.

I can imagine leaders in our community, having read my recent columns on openness, scoffing when they read our story last week on the local sports complex. We published incorrectly that land was being sold, rather than donated, at fair-market value as part of the project proposal. It was a key component of the proposal and the story. It was an editing mistake, not a reporting one, and it affected us all. I won't dwell on the mistake much here, but the editor who inserted the incorrect word simply had never heard of anyone donating something at fair market value. You sell things at a fair market value, right? Well, you also can donate them at such value for tax purposes.

The copy editor who made the mistake has been rock solid for decades; in fact, without his professionalism and steady helping hand early in my career, I probably would have left journalism in my early 20s.

Still, I can imagine high-ranking officials scoffing, "This is why we're not transparent. You can't get the facts straight!"

Transparency applies to journalists, too.

We strive for accuracy, always. And, yes, we sometimes come up short.

Last week our publisher, Jon Rust, wrote a column setting the record straight on our story. We ran a correction on the records page. And we wrote another story, a follow-up, with the intention of making certain the correct information was known.

Sometimes I ponder what it's like making mistakes in other professions. If you're a firefighter or a police officer, a mistake can cost a life. If you're a carpenter, you can lose a finger. If you're a clerk at a store, you can lose money. Other professions, when you make a mistake, you simply say, "Oops! Sorry about that. Here's a free cookie," and move on.

No matter where you work, though, you're bound to make mistakes. When people roll their eyes at a newspaper's errors, I wonder if they consider how many mistakes they make on a daily or weekly basis. I wonder if they ponder how misunderstandings happen in their own lives. In the newspaper business, it's ethically standard that we admit our errors. That's our version of transparency.

As much as we all hate making mistakes, as much as they follow us around, I do take pride that we as newspaper journalists own up to them.

As part of our culture here, we have an online fact-check feature that allows readers to report errors. When we make corrections online, we write an editor's note at the top of the story to let readers know that a mistake has been edited. We run our corrections on our records page. Sometimes we do more, such as rerunning an item.

I have to remind myself that we get far more right than we get wrong.

We publish thousands upon thousands of words every day. From our morning weather text alerts, to obituaries, to stories, captions and headlines, there are many opportunities for error. It's a process that begins when our first people arrive at 6:30 a.m. and doesn't end until midnight when the pages hit the press.

We hope that our processes and our people eliminate as many mistakes as possible.

We regret the errors, but we don't regret our day-to-day efforts we make to bring you accurate information. And we don't regret our transparency to let you know when we've missed the mark.

Bob Miller is editor of the Southeast Missourian.