There’s nothing worse for a journalist than to get something wrong. If we’re having trouble sleeping at night, that’s probably what’s doing it.
Common garden variety mistakes include misspelled names, bad math and wrong attribution.
Sometimes writers can misunderstand what they’re being told and report it wrong in the story. Other times, unclear writing can muddy the reporter’s intention and give readers the wrong impression.
Read Also
Late season rainfall creates concern about Prairie crop quality
Praying for rain is being replaced with the hope that rain can stop for harvest. Rainfall in July and early August has been much greater than normal.
And it’s not just reporters who make mistakes — editors do, too, and I very much include myself in that company.
Overzealous editing causes most of the problems, as does careless headline writing.
This winter, during a major snowstorm that blanketed much of the Prairies, I asked Paul Yanko, our web editor who lives on an acreage outside of Vanscoy, Sask., to take a photo of the snow in his yard.
Now, I know full well that Vanscoy is in Saskatchewan and not Alberta, but when I wrote the photo caption, I wrote “Vanscoy, Alta.,” instead of “Vanscoy, Sask.”
I was baffled when it was pointed out to me.
Needless to say, when we make an error in the paper, we are quick to correct it. Mercifully, the corrections box on page 2 isn’t used that often, although it is this week.
Sometimes readers point something out to us that we’re not sure requires a correction.
For example, we recently ran a story about Lyle Stewart, the former Saskatchewan agriculture minister who died this summer.
The story had lots of nice things to say about Stewart, but also included a controversy from two years ago when he invited Colin Thatcher to attend the throne speech. Thatcher is a former Saskatchewan cabinet minister, but he had also been convicted of killing his wife in the 1980s.
The writer wrote that Thatcher had served his sentence, but a reader informed us that because he had been given a life sentence and was now out on parole, he was still serving his sentence, only in the community and not in prison.
Good point.
In another example, a story in June about Ukrainian businesspeople attending Canada’s Farm Show in Regina mentioned the city of Kiev.
We received an outraged email from a reader who pointed out that the western world was now using the Ukrainian spelling Kyiv instead of the Russian spelling.
Again, good point.
