Three words were banged into our heads in journalism school: accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.
Never assume, we were lectured. Always make sure.
It was good advice, and something that all of us in this business strive for every day.
However, mistakes still happen, and another pearl of wisdom passed on to us by our instructors was to own up to our mistakes and correct them as promptly as possible.
We don’t make a lot of mistakes at The Western Producer, largely because we pay so much attention to Lesson No. 1.
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However, when we do, we also pay close attention to Lesson No. 2.
Even that can be fraught with peril.
Years ago we had to correct an error in a story, but in the process of writing the correction, we made a new error. So, the next week we had to run another correction correcting the correction. It wasn’t one of our shinier moments.
As a result, I’m no stranger to being asked to correct errors.
However, until recently, I had never had the pleasure of being on the other end of that conversation, asking for a correction.
Last month, one of the millions of folks who reside in the Twitterverse posted a tweet wondering if the powers made available under the Emergencies Act would be used to freeze the bank accounts of media outlets that had been assisting the anti-vaccine mandate protest in Ottawa.
It’s the kind of thing you see on Twitter all the time and nothing I would have paid much attention to, if it hadn’t been for the fact that The Western Producer was included in the list of media outlets that the tweeter was assuming were assisting the protesters.
The Producer’s role in helping the anti-vaccine mandate movement was news to me, and I immediately picked up the phone to ask the tweeter why we had been included in that list.
It turns out the tweeter had got us mixed up with another prairie publication whose name also starts with the word “Western.” An apology was offered and a new tweet was posted correcting the mistake.
It was an interesting exercise for someone who has spent his career trying as hard as possible to prevent errors and quickly correcting them when they are made.
