Those devilish details
Sparked by the story behind The New York Times' 60,000th edition, reflections on the importance of fighting for accuracy, whether days, years or even a century after the botched fact.
Paying attention to detail is a sort of game for me.
Sometimes, I’m really bad at it—like the time I was dumbfounded when my wife asked if I knew why someone, with whom we’d just been at a party, had only one arm.
“What are you talking about?” I replied.
“You didn’t notice she had only one arm?”
Over 33 years later, I’m still hearing about that one. (In my defense, there were about 20 people at this party, so my focus was diluted.)
Other times, I do better.
For example, a little over a year earlier, on January 11, 1989, I was a week into my newspaper internship at the Macon Telegraph and News, editing the front page of the next day’s edition, when something caught my eye.
Immediately below is that day’s masthead—and underneath it is the next day’s (after my copy-editing catch):
Can you spot the difference? (Clicking on each image will enlarge it.)
If you still don’t see it, maybe this zoom-in will do the trick:
From the January 11 issue:
From the January 12 issue:
The good news: I demonstrated my attention to detail to the entire copy desk team.
The bad news: it was my eighth day of work. Should have caught it sooner.
Also, rather than gushing over my (belated) eagle eye, the copy desk chief went straight to ticked off—at himself, at everyone else on the copy desk, at the world, for this embarrassing oversight, day after day, for 11 days.
On one level, it wasn’t a big deal: nobody was harmed or misled by the delayed updating of the copyright year. But on another level—and as reflected by the copy desk chief’s reaction—it was huge: if we were not dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s here, what else were we missing? Where were our other blind spots?
Attention to detail isn’t a game—it’s a serious matter of credibility.
In related news, yesterday was issue #60,000 for The New York Times. I know that fact only by a thin thread: Had I not been in a Madison, Wisconsin hotel lobby the previous day—where the paper was lying in wait—it’s doubtful I would have discovered that day’s issue number (found in the upper left corner of the edition) was 59,999.
That’s how I came to be on the look-out for the milestone moment Tuesday:
…which is what led me to this story, With Issue No. 60,000, One Correction Comes to Mind. Written by David W. Dunlap, a retired reporter and columnist, the piece is paywalled, so I’ve cut-and-pasted how it starts:
On Tuesday, Dec. 12, The New York Times will print its 60,000th issue.
Readers of the newspaper will see this milestone reflected under The Times’s motto at the top of the front page: “Vol. CLXXIII …. No. 60,000.” (The volume represents our 173rd year of publication.)
A cake seems to be called for, but we are chary1. Our celebration of the 50,000th issue on March 14, 1995, turned out to be more than a year premature.
The mistake was discovered in 1999 by Aaron Donovan, a 24-year-old news assistant whose job included updating the issue number. (The task is now automated.) Prompted by curiosity, Mr. Donovan figured out that The Times had inadvertently credited itself with 500 issues too many on Feb. 7, 1898, when the number jumped overnight from 14,499 to 15,000. The error went undetected for 101 years.”
Allan M. Siegal, an assistant managing editor in 1999, decided that New Year’s Day would be the ideal moment to right the wrong and issue a correction. The paper of Dec. 31, 1999, was numbered 51,753.
The next day’s paper, Jan. 1, 2000, was designated No. 51,254 — a reversion. Subsequent papers have followed the revised sequencing…
By the way, anyone can access the story, (“A Correction; Welcome to 51,254”) that set the record—and numbers—straight on January 1, 2000.
Mistakes happen.
Well, let’s put that in the active voice—people make mistakes—because action is what’s called for when mistakes are detected.
Whether it takes 11 days, 101 years, or some other span of time, it’s imperative to acknowledge errors and then, to whatever degree within our power, fix ’em.
Especially reflecting on my still-occasional role as a journalist, it’s not a matter of if, but when we make mistakes: What do we do then?
In yesterday’s story, responding to Dunlap’s asking whether he felt a sense of pride and accomplishment when the numbering sequence was fixed, Donovan’s recollection gets to the heart of this “what now?” question:
Even though it was made a century earlier, he [assistant managing editor Al Siegal] could have thought the error was an embarrassment. Or if he had been a much different person, he could have said: “Ehhh, who cares?” Or even, “Let’s just forget about this, all right?” Instead, he informed the other senior editors and they decided it was worth correcting. I think their decision to update the number was a good one. The extra attention adds to the mystique of the paper and underscores a commitment to accuracy.
Let me reiterate that last part: Underscores a commitment to accuracy.
Failure to address mistakes does the opposite—it casts doubt about commitment to accuracy.2
Related Inside Edge reading:
You are not entitled to your facts
Let’s start with the obvious: Everyone makes mistakes. That includes journalists. Among my most memorable gaffes was one about 25 years ago, when I referred to a high school student as “Dustin Hoffman.” He shared only a first name with the famous actor and my mind drifted into auto-celebrity actor mode as I tapped out my story.
Chary means “cautiously or suspiciously reluctant to do something.” Sort of like “wary.”
Here’s a similar, but not precisely the same, scenario of recent vintage:
There is a Chicago newspaper reporter for whom I have been a source several times over the past few years. Two months ago, I alerted her to two grammatical mistakes in an unrelated story that she had written a few days earlier.
One was the misuse of the phrase “won handily” (it was published as “won handedly”) and another was stating a candidate for higher office had shared “thoughts in crime” instead of “thoughts on crime.”
Neither was a matter of factual accuracy, but of proper grammar.
I alerted her to the miscues, respectfully and privately, via voicemail and e-mail, thinking that she would want to make fixes to those pieces (which exist only online—this outlet has no print edition). I got no response; a week later, after fretting whether I was being curmudgeonly, I decided to follow up again by e-mail:
“I made a mental note to circle back to this—those grammatical errors that I noted last week (below) in your story.
I see the paper hasn't corrected them and am curious as to why not. Is it seen as too minor? It's not as if it's a factual error, just a way of "cleaning up" (the same way I fix typos in my Substack, for example). I do realize that making the tweaks would possibly create a new "Updated" timestamp, and that might not be desirable as it could cause confusion/speculation that the paper did some substantive after-the-fact edits?
Genuinely curious---not at all judgmental (after all, as I have noted, I routinely have grammar/spelling things crop up in my writing).
Over the years, I routinely alert journalists (both those I know and those that I don't) to these minor things, since I know that as a whole, we go to great lengths to be accurate in all that we do.”
To this day, still no response. And those grammar mistakes remain. Puzzling, especially since the reporter’s made corrections when I have brought factual errors to her attention on stories relating to my work as a spokesman.
For now, I’m left with the impression that her feeling echoes what Donovan said could have been The New York Times’ response two dozen years ago to the century-old edition-number snafu: “Ehhh, who cares?” Or even, “Let’s just forget about this, all right?”
The brilliant Kathryn Schulz wrote a book, "Being Wrong," that very much touched on the part of the post about the value of coming clean. In particular, I think of how she details Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's policy of issuing exhaustive reports on their errors.
Note this section. "The instant the patient drew attention to the mistake, the surgeon realized what had happened, explained it as thoroughly as possible, and - although the act must have felt woefully inadequate - apologized. He then contacted the chief of his department and Paul Levy, the hospital's CEO, and told them about the situation. Reviewing the case, Levy and other BIDMC higher-ups decided that the mistake was serious enough that both the hospital and the community it served deserved to know what had happened. In very short order, they emailed the entire hospital staff - some 5,000 people - and sent a press release about the incident to local media outlets.
"Needless to say, this uncommon reaction didn't come out of nowhere. In Januray 2008, six months before the botched surgery, Levy, his board, and his staff made a kind of New Year's Resolution: by January 1, 2012, they would eliminate all preventable medical harm....."
Later in the chapter, Schulz writes, "So we can't catch all our errors, or catch up to error in general. Nor, however, can we give up the chase, since the price of doing so - in lives, money, and sheer folly - is simply too steep. Our only choice, then, is to keep living with wrongness, in all its strangely evasive omnipresence."
As you can see, Schulz does not believe the way to avoid error is to deny it.
Detail can also drive you batty, so if we think we have an above-average ability to detect errors, we must come up with a narrative for that that isn't wholly depressing. Even just thinking that we somehow just have the skill isn't reassuring. It doesn't seem like a lot to latch on to, doesn't give us confidence we will catch all the errors we want to. We are at least somewhat ahead of the game if we painstakingly read everything in front of us, if we don't cut corners. But there is more a feeling of invincibility if we are able to analyze a situation and cross-check to find errors. That's one reason I like statistics. When I find errors, it's not because I see them, per se, it's because I am looking at something else, tangentially related, and say, "Wait a second...."
There's nor real trick to noticing the wrong year that has to do with working smarter, that I can see. I mean, I guess one could argue that those who think about the New Year more, who are generally cognizant of the outside world, would be more likely to catch it, but it's mostly just about reading everything in front of them and about dumb luck. And reading everything can be really tedious. I'm not going to say there haven't been times that I checked thoroughly just because I had to, just because I was competitive, or afraid of my boss, or of the consequences if I missed that error. I'm not going to say that I haven't checked thoroughly sometimes hating it. But I prefer that not to be the case.
Catching that a New York Times edition wasn't the 50,000th seems less dehumanizing than spotting the wrong year on the masthead. One could have worked back and thought about the question and questioned the accuracy. I know I'm not the only person who thinks sometimes in terms of the number of days that have passed, who is familiar with that metric. A friend and I both independently talked about our excitement as we approached our 10,000th day, for example.
I'm very surprised by the current averred low rate of New Year's Resolutions. When people ask me what mine will be, they always seem shocked that I won't be making one, and that I don't approve of the idea. I guess I should be hanging out with Inside Edge people.