Everyone makes mistakes (you may have seen one on this blog). That's why newspapers and magazines have copy editors (at least, some of them still do). But editors are human, and they can make mistakes.
David Vecsey, an editor at the New York Times, writes about what happens when they make a mistake or miss something (which for an editor, amounts to the same thing).
Reading through New York Times corrections is like taking a guided tour of journalism’s pitfalls. It’s where you discover the Ginsberg-Ginsburg Vortex, a black hole that has devoured many a journalist who has confused the names of the poet and the justice. And it’s a parallel universe in which former Secretary of State George P. Shultz has a “c” in his last name, and the Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz has a “t.”
But Times corrections are so much more than pedestrian spelling mistakes. They are wonderfully nuanced cultural explorations. When we misidentified the name of Bilbo Baggins’s sword in “The Hobbit” as Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, it was both the greatest and the nerdiest correction of all time. (Real nerds also noted that Bilbo Baggins, being a Hobbit, didn’t carry a “sword” but a “dagger.” Its name was Sting.)
Back when I was a cub reporter at The Peoria Journal Star, I was moping around the office kicking myself over some ridiculous thing I got wrong. One of the veteran reporters pulled me aside. “Hey, Vecsey,” he said. “Look: Doctors bury their mistakes. Lawyers lock theirs away. But reporters print theirs for the whole damn world to see.”
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