If Star misspells your name, we will correct: Public Editor

In journalism schools across Canada this week, many a freshman student will learn one of the foremost lessons of the J-school classroom: Get someone’s name wrong and you get a failing grade.

In the decade I taught at Ryerson University’s journalism school my students understood that no matter how brilliant their reporting and writing, if they messed up a name, they got an automatic F on that assignment. That’s a common policy of most journalism schools.

In the Star’s newsroom, we don’t hand out failing grades for misspelled, mixed-up names. But we do publish corrections.

If the Star gets a given or surname wrong, whether in the newspaper or online, we always correct. That is a fundamental undertaking of the Star’s corrections practice.

Getting names right has long been considered “the bedrock measure of accuracy” in journalism. Correcting when we make mistakes matters greatly both to those whose names we get wrong and to readers.

Every media credibility study I’ve looked at indicates that readers link credibility with basic accuracy and believe that getting names right is a significant indication of the overall accuracy of the journalist and the news organization.

We well know it’s a fact that if we get your name wrong you’ll wonder what else we got wrong. That’s why double-checking names must be the most basic of fact-checking for journalists.

But even the most careful journalists can make mistakes with names. Of 198 corrections published in the Star in the first half of this year, 58 were for wrong names. That’s 29 per cent of all corrections and tracking upward from last year when 100 of 415 newspaper corrections (just under 25 per cent) were for incorrect names.

We also made 316 online-only corrections in those six months, a great many for incorrect names.

I can’t imagine anyone here would disagree that’s too many incorrect names making it into the Star. Clearly, the Star could enhance its accuracy record considerably by making even more concerted efforts across the newsroom to ensure all first and last names are stated and spelled correctly.

I can assure you no journalist sets out to mangle someone’s name. A recent Canadian research study, “Verification as a Strategic Ritual: How journalists retrospectively describe processes for ensuring accuracy” found that the newspaper journalists interviewed about their methods of verifying information before publication all reported that they always took steps to ensure their subjects’ names were correct.

“An almost universal practice among participants is asking sources to spell their own name to ensure correct spelling, either at the beginning or the end of the interview,” stated the study published in February’s Journalism Practice.

As the study states, these journalists said they regarded an mistake in someone’s name as “a very visible error that can have implications for professional credibility.”

The Star’s error-tracking data leads me to two conclusions about how and why journalists get names wrong: Some do indeed fail in the basic requirement to verify the name and its spelling with the source. More often, they make mistakes when inputting names to their computers — your basic “typo” that’s subsequently not caught in their self-editing and the overall newsroom editing process.

Most mistakes in the Star start with writers. Our error data indicates that of the 198 corrections overall from January through June, 139 errors are classified as writing errors by reporters (100), columnists (19), freelance writers (16), editorial writers (2) and letter writers (2).

With newsroom restructuring resulting in fewer copy editors in the newsroom (and indeed in every newsroom throughout North America) there’s a strong case to be made that every writer must learn techniques to become their own best editor.

In coming weeks, I’ll be working with the newsroom to put together training sessions to help writers better catch their own errors and ensure that all writers have access to accuracy checklists. Such checklists have been proven to make a considerable difference in minimizing errors in names and other such basic facts. Simply reading our work back to ourselves doesn’t work in catching many errors — especially typos — because as Joseph T. Hallinan writes in Why We Make Mistakes, “By and large, we see what we expect to see.”

Whatever steps the newsroom and individual journalists take to minimize mistakes, some errors are inevitable given journalism’s deadline driven realities.

That’s why I make this pledge to you: If the Star gets your name wrong, we will publish a correction.