It’s time to catch up with how news sources say the Register is treating them.
Accuracy Check forms were sent to 145 sources in February, March and April; 93 were returned.
Sources evaluate our journalists on accuracy, news judgment and ethics.
The four dings were over accuracy – two misspelled names and two mangled quotations. Corrections were published.
Just as importantly, the process led to several conversations.
One is between the source and the journalist. Usually, sources are forgiving and the journalists apologetic.
Another occurs between the journalist and her or his supervisor. They talk about what went wrong and ways to avoid trouble in the future.
A reporter who misspells a name, for example, will examine her or his note-taking and fact-checking processes.
The journalist writes the correction and includes for internal use an explanation of how the error occurred. The correction is edited first by the supervisory editor and then must be signed off by that boss’s boss. (Corrections are considered during journalists’ performance evaluations, too.)
After that, the correction is published.
These days, the corrections can be front-page news.
Readers who have contacted me mostly like the new policy of running corrections on the front page of the section in which the error occurred. One reader, however, called my previous column on the new policy “self-serving.” That wasn’t my intention, but I do think making corrections more prominent is the right thing to do.
The good news out of these Accuracy Checks is that sources thought the journalists showed good judgment, and none questioned reporters’ ethics.
In fact, several sources – ranging from some interviewed for the first time to others whose activities put them frequently on the other end of reporters’ questions – used the forms for effusive praise.
That’s always welcome.
IN MEMORIAM
I’d like to note the death last week of communications scholar Jim Carey, who taught at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York.
I had the pleasure of meeting him once 10 years ago at a conference in Austin, Texas.
He had a big effect on me with his thoughtful manner, inquisitiveness and congeniality.
He said he began every day posing the same question: “Life is ?”
And he would engage his mind and those of people he taught, knew or met in discussing the best answers.
On a bus ride between seminars, we sat together, talking about the sad loss of public trust in journalism and of the need for the kind of journalism that best serves democracy.
He spoke, I recall, about the ongoing conversations of life, including those about public life, and of the need for citizen engagement in the community.
I later sought out some of his enlightening work on the nexus of community, communications and culture.
So, as I commemorate his life, I’m thinking one good answer to his daily question would be that life is conversation.
And journalists are in a place where they can seek, discover and spread those conversations.
Here’s to doing so accurately, wisely and fairly.
