Ensuring Accuracy

I’ve mentioned in past posts that there are multiple layers of people involved in the production of an issue of Horizons.

When all of the writing and editing is finished, most of the students in the Publications class don't see the articles again until they're in print. Even the editors (with the exception of the editor-in-chief) can forget about the pieces once they've finished final edits.

The articles, however, don't go away for Professor Karyn Smith or for me. It is when they are “done” that we come in to review them and make sure they're ready for print.

There are three main objectives to the review process. The first is grading, which is handled entirely by Smith. The second goal is to touch up the most egregious grammar, spelling, punctuation and formatting errors. Editors generally catch some, but not all of these problems. We don't expect them to be perfect. They are, after all, in the same process of learning as any of the other students.

The third – and possibly most important - objective to conducting reviews of every article is to flag any major factual errors or plagiarism that might have occurred.

Errors are the bane of journalists, but they are also a reality of the job. Both novices and veterans can make mistakes. Although verification is built into reporting, a surfeit of potential loopholes exists.

You can misunderstand what someone tells you. You can be lied to. You can be misled by outdated information. You can phrase a sentence in a way that gives readers a false impression. You can hit the wrong number on the keyboard. You can omit a fact that provides necessary context for the story.

Time pressures are one of the leading causes of errors. Reporters have deadlines, and in the professional world, there is stiff competition to be the first to break a story. This pressure tripped up both CNN and Fox News in 2012 when they wrongly reported that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the Affordable Care Act. In their rush to get the news out live, both outlets failed to read the entire ruling, which did not support the constitutionality of the ACA under the Commerce Clause, but did support it under the federal government's authority to levy taxes. The high-profile boondoggles earned the two news agencies the joint award of “Error of the Year” by Craig Silverman of Poynter's Regret the Error blog.

When you do make a mistake, someone is bound to point it out. I had this happen to me on one of my first stories, when I mixed up the names of two interviewees in my quotes. It happened to me again when I accidentally listed a source as being one year older than she actually was. Both people mentioned the mistakes to me, and although there were no hard feelings, I was thoroughly embarrassed.

The mistakes I made were not as glaring as, say, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” But if left unchecked, errors can cumulatively undermine the legitimacy of a news agency. Student journalists may be forgiven more quickly when they make minor slips, but there is a certain degree of quality control a college newspaper must embrace to stay relevant.

Plagiarism, while less endemic, is also a serious concern. It is especially difficult for the staff to avoid because they are not used to the conventions of citation in journalism, and therefore end up either under-attributing or over-attributing. The latter is innocuous; it simply clutters a story. The former, however, can become a legal and educational liability.

I only encountered one case during my time as editor-in-chief in which a reporter for Horizons committed plagiarism. She was a foreign student who struggled with several other aspects of writing. When we discovered that she had copied entire paragraphs of text from other sources, we asked her what had happened and explained why it was dangerous to do. It turned out that although she understood the need to credit quotations, she had not realized that she needed to cite sources from which she gathered facts or broader ideas. She was fortunate: there was enough time for her to rewrite the piece properly. She and I worked together on it, and she never repeated the mistake after that.

The weekend after students submitted their final drafts, I holed myself up in my living room and started going through articles one-by-one.

Most, as I expected, looked okay. I found only a few factual errors. One article relied on outdated information in explaining upcoming changes to the college; the changes had already taken place. I contacted the editor and alerted her to the issue, then suggested a few ways for her to handle it. She decided how to resolve the problem and made the necessary adjustments.

Still, it’s not possible to verify everything, and our collective background knowledge, though broad, is far from infinite. There are likely errors that will be printed.

When they are, I guarantee that someone on the staff will hear about them.