A POSTCARD Maria Carrillo received in January 2006, four months after she was named managing editor of The Virginian-Pilot, is taped to a shelf in her office, where she's likely to see its message at least once a day.
"12 out of 13 miners ARE DEAD!! You got it wrong. Do not run articles making excuses. Retake journalism 101."
The writer was referring to a West Virginia coal mine explosion, in which 12 miners were mistakenly reported to have been "found alive" in an early morning account of the rescue operation. The report resulted from what's known in the newsroom as a "source error" - information that comes from an individual or organization presumed to be reliable - but that made it no less painful.
Like scores of other newspapers across America, The Pilot relied on an Associated Press dispatch on what had been a closely watched story. Carrillo was left to apologize to readers for the page-wide, eye-grabbing celebratory headline that ran across the front page Jan. 4, 2006.
The memory of that correction still haunts her. It surely ranks as the most egregious of the 962 errors for which The Pilot has issued corrections since the beginning of 2006. A spreadsheet of those corrections is a report card on the most important responsibility a newspaper has to its readers - namely, getting it right.
That list also bears witness to the scrutiny so many Pilot readers bring to the newspaper, and the obscure misinformation they want corrected. For some readers it is important that we do not mistake, for example, the Christian population of China, the year Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Raven," and that the gray hairstreak butterfly does not lay its eggs exclusively on the leaves of the parsley hawthorn tree.
The list also details the vast number of ways a newspaper can err: in news copy, in photo captions, in headlines, in maps, in graphics. It's a list that underscores the near impossibility of avoiding every mistake.
So-called "source errors," like the one related to the Sago mine disaster, accounted for about 25 percent of the corrections. Among those who reportedly provided The Pilot with misinformation were the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, Old Dominion University, the Chrysler Museum, Web sites maintained by the city of Norfolk and the Virginia Beach school division and numerous high school athletic coaches.
The Pilot's Sports section has significantly more errors than other sections, largely because there is more work completed against deadlines than in other sections of the paper. In addition, the section relies heavily on sources for information about sporting events, particularly those in the region's dozens of high schools.
There are, to be sure, "some boneheaded mistakes" that appear in the section, acknowledges Colleen McDaniel, the Sports editor. But given that The Pilot probably runs the names of thousands of kids every year, she thinks her section has a pretty good average. "Perfection is not the nature of this business," she added.
Carrillo, too, concedes that mistakes come with the territory. Keeping that score near zero depends on a collective commitment to accuracy, but beyond careful hiring decisions and a clear expectation of due diligence, there is no way to engineer excellence up front.
An awareness among newsroom staffers of the grave consequences of too many errors doubtless helps keep the number in check. Five corrections a year is considered "a performance issue." A continuing pattern of errors is grounds for termination.
The Pilot's overall goal for corrections is a maximum of one a day. The spreadsheet reveals that while there's room for improvement, the score is not too far off the mark. The total of 962 errors over 26 months averages out to 37 corrections a month.
About 80 of those errors were mistakes that fall under the heading of journalism's biggest sin, a misspelled or incorrect name. Corrections of place names numbered about two dozen. We have misidentified people by gender. Mischaracterizations of sailors, soldiers and Marines were corrected a few times. Millions and billions confound us once in a while.
And yes, we really ought to know how to spell Ocracoke and Israel, both misspelled twice in the months covered by the spreadsheet. Worse still, we told readers in 2006 that Elie Wiesel was dead when he was and remains very much alive. We wished the writer Ken Kesey a happy 72nd birthday in September 2007. He died in November 2001.
The days when all these corrections appeared on page 2 were not especially good ones for Carrillo. But for her, alas, the raven's cry of "nevermore" would be an empty exercise. The best she can hope for is never more than one a day.
Joyce Hoffmann, the public editor, is an associate professor in the English Department at Old Dominion University. Reach her at (757) 446-2475 or public.editor@pilotonline.com.