AFTER DEADLINE
Little errors can have big impact
By Anne Harpham
Some years ago, when I was a reporter covering the airlines and tourism for The Advertiser, I wrote a story on a new lower air fare. The story ran on a Saturday and I mistakenly said in the story that United Airlines' downtown ticket office would be open that day. There was such a line outside the ticket office, they opened for business.
It was my mistake, it was certainly not intentional and to this day I don't know how I got it wrong. But while it was neither life nor death, even my seemingly small error affected a number of people: everyone who went downtown assuming my story was accurate and the poor United employees who got called in to address a problem I caused.
Readers expect what they read to be true. If we say a ticket office will be open, they go downtown expecting to be able to purchase a plane ticket.
Mistakes in print can inconvenience readers in other ways. A wrong phone number not only means readers don't know where to call for information but can wreak great inconvenience for the person who has the number we did publish. Sometimes when we print bum information, getting a date or time wrong, we can't correct it until the event is over. That doesn't help the reader much.
Sometimes our errors are much bigger. We said in the lead paragraph of a Page 1 banner story last Sunday that Hawaiian Electric Co. wanted to string 75 to 100 poles along Wa'ahila Ridge. The story was on the front page not because of the number of poles but because of a hearing officer's recommendation against the project.
But because of a reporter's error, and the subsequent failure of editors who handled the story to catch the mistake, we seriously inflated the size of the HECO project, which of course has been the subject of much controversy in Honolulu for several years.
The reporter was busy, worked on more than one story that day, and didn't see the error. She doesn't feel good about the mistake and was first in line to admit it was her fault.
Were we trying to slant the story? No. Were we negligent in our handling of the story? Negligent is a pretty strong word. The New World Dictionary definition includes: careless, lax, inattentive, or indifferent. I don't believe anyone involved with that story was indifferent. But, yes, inattentiveness certainly came into play with at least some of the handling of the story.
The reporter knew HECO was proposing to replace 20 poles. What she meant to say was 75- to 100-foot poles and left a word out. She didn't see the error and despite the number of times we have written about this project, no editor picked up on the mistake. It was an error that could have and should have been avoided.
A lot is expected of reporters and copy editors. Sometimes, reporters get thrown into stories they are not very familiar with. The expectation is they will background themselves, will know what questions to ask and will be cognizant of how important context is. Copy editors are truly generalists. They handle a lot of stories on a lot of subjects and must know community, national and world issues. They are expected to catch errors.
The reality is reporters more often go the extra mile to verify information, track down sources, and broaden stories. Copy editors catch more than they miss. And we don't take lightly the ones we do miss.
Senior editor Anne Harpham is the reader representative. Reach her at aharpham@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8033.
