Dan Lee isn’t a politician or a publicist, but his name is probably becoming familiar in the newsroom over at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
A librarian, Lee has happened into an unpaid side career – you could call it a hobby – sending corrections to the daily newspaper.
I first became acquainted with Lee last summer when he asked me via email why the paper didn’t appear to have a standard approach to correcting the online versions of stories it had corrected in print. I didn’t have a good answer for him, but in the weeks that followed, as Lee shared stories of his communications with various JS staffers over errors he found in the paper, I grew fascinated with his attention to detail.
I’m not sure if fascinated is the adjective a lot of JS staffers would use for their own reaction, but the responses he shared with me ranged from matter-of-fact acknowledgement to polite and even good-natured thanks.
His eye for errors ranges widely. Lee called the paper’s attention to a photo caption that inadvertently placed a bakery on “S. 68th Street.” It was on North 69th Street. The paper corrected the online caption, though no one replied to him about it. When a sports story mentioned three different years in which St. Louis had a 10-game lead after the All-Star break and “went on to win the World Series,” Lee pointed out that the Cardinals lost two of those Series; saying merely that they “went on to the World Series” would have been the accurate phrasing.
But no one responded when Lee flagged a typo in a sports column that said (about Cy Young award balloting) “you could do worse that [sic, with emphasis added] Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels.” As of this week, “that” still had not been corrected to “than.”
A while back I asked Lee some questions about his pursuit of accuracy in the paper. He answered promptly enough, but with one thing or another, the story languished in my computer.
Then, last week, I spotted a column by Craig Silverman about what some newspapers have learned by directly soliciting the sort of feedback readers like Lee offer. Silverman writes a regular column on corrections hosted by the Poynter Institute, a journalism training organization and think tank.
Since 2010, the Register Citizen of Litchfield, Conn., has put a link with every story online enabling readers to send a message to the paper about factual errors in the story. The Columbia Missourian does something similar, and makes it a reader contest. Silverman’s article offers eight helpful lessons from those experiences.
All that reminded me of my exchanges with Lee. I touched base and learned he’s still at it.
And he’s been at it – corresponding with the JS about errors – since 2004. Why?
“Errors should be corrected for accuracy,” he told me in our email interview. “Readers rely on newspapers for accuracy. Imagine a student, writer or historian researching the paper on microfilm or database decades in the future. They’ll write a blog, article or book based on information they believe is accurate, but might not be.”
Only about half of his correction suggestions result in any response at all, Lee says – a number he finds surprising. And about half of those lead to a correction either online, in the paper or both. “The other half of the responses have been a mix ranging from saying corrections will be made, but not followed-through in print or online, to noncommittal thank you’s, to justifications and explanations of what was written.”
Lee sees the errors as likely symptoms of staff reductions that leave the remaining reporters and editors working harder and longer, with more and more to do. Lee’s time, too, is limited; he tells me that he hasn’t taken other news outlets to task for errors, “but maybe I should, especially with local TV newscasts.”
Why is he so absorbed by the practice of correcting newspaper errors?
“I’m a librarian and we’re trained to help patrons find accurate information the best we can with available resources,” he says. “That rubs off when I read a paper, magazine or book.” He emailed a correction to Time magazine when he spotted an error in geography in the magazine, he notes.
I asked Lee what he would do if he was in charge of setting a news organization’s policy on dealing with errors. He credits the San Francisco Chronicle and London’s The Guardian for prominently listing on their websites phone numbers and email addresses for readers to report errors they find. (By comparisons: The JS has a home page link to its corrections list, but if there’s a single clearinghouse link to submit corrections, I can’t find it easily.)
Lee complimented how the JS handled a correction on a Michael Hunt column, though.
“They published a correction on p. 2 of the September 29th main section, corrected the article online and noted what was corrected at the top of his column. Hopefully that will happen more in the future.”
But while he enjoyed the documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times, Lee says it’s the news itself that interests him more than the sausage-making of journalism. “News is how I find out what’s happening in town and around the world,” he says. “I don’t want to sound misinformed if I use inaccurate information from the news.”
I’ve asked JS Managing Editor George Stanley some questions about the whole business of correcting errors. If he responds, I’ll update this column.
In the meantime, I suspect I’m lucky that Mr. Lee has never read this column all that closely.
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