On getting it right …

I teach journalism, and I have in my newswriting courses a grading policy that my students would call … well, draconian.

If a student — any student of any capability, including the very best — misspells a proper name, I stop reading and assign an automatic “F” to the story. And remember, a proper name is more than just someone’s name. It’s any word with an initial capital letter (uppercase to us literate geeks). That’s product names. Street names. City and towns. States. Get it wrong; get an “F.”

I don’t stop there. If a student — again, any student — commits an error in fact, then each error in fact will result in a third-of-a-letter grade deduction.

So it’s possible for students to misspell and illfactualize (a new word I just made up; it’s a new game you can play at home) themselves into grading oblivion — a minus score.

So why should I subject you, my loyal readers, to this drivel? Because, it seems, I am an about-to-be-extinct dinosaur trying to cope with an evolution in the meaning of such words as “fact,” “accuracy,” “truth” and “credibility.”

Today I read a letter to our readers from Richard M. Smith, chairman and editor-in-chief of Newsweek.

In it he attempts to explain that Newsweek has hardened its policy on the use of anonymous sources in wake of the Guantanamo-Quran fiasco. In the name of “accuracy and public trust,” he writes that Newsweek will never again use the phrase “sources say.” Instead, the newsmagazine will use new guidelines governing the use of anonymice — approval of a top editor, significant backchecking, independent confirmation where possible, revelation of the source’s ax to grind, and so on.

In other words, it’s another version of “we’ll only do it when we’re convinced we’re right.” There’s no sign that anonymous sources will disappear — only that more context will be provided about said sources.

I’m not sure how this new policy affects “fact,” “accuracy” and “truth.” It appears to me that these words have meanings that now fall on a sliding scale. Perhaps organizations such as Newsweek that use anonymice can run disclaimers in such stories: “This story contains facts 85 percent verifiable; overall accuracy score is 79 percent; truth quotient is 72 percent, plus or minus 3 percent.”

The LA Times‘ media critic, David Shaw, chimes in on anonymice in his Media Matters column, saying, “I’m convinced that significantly reducing the number of unnamed sources could go a long way toward restoring the public’s trust in the news media.” That means, to me, when journalists attach names to the facts the sources allege — instead of sources hiding behind the false facade of anonymity — then readers can assess for themselves the level of fact, accuracy and truth.

But little errors corrode fact, accuracy and truth as well.

Shaw notes that The New York Times‘ internal review of its own credibility problems says the newspaper ought to “reduce factual errors.”

Each day, 1,456 daily newspaper organizations produce the equivalent of a book. Day after day. So, they make mistakes. In fact. In the spelling of names. In ages. In identifications of people. In dollar amounts in municipal budget and annual report stories. All kinds of errors, resulting in the 3,200 corrections the Times ran last year, according to Shaw.

It’s the little inaccuracies that compound themselves into loss of reader credibililty — and ultimately to loss of circulation.

Carole Leigh Hutton, the Detroit Free Press‘ publisher and editor who had to deal with the Mitch Albom case, is a Joanie-Come-Lately to the death of a thousand tiny inaccuracies.

According to the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, she told an audience of about 350 people at the National Writers Workshop that she was astonished by the errors she said found in other news organizations’ coverage of the Albom flap.

I’d like to know how many times she’s seen her name in a newspaper with the “e” left off her first name, Carole. More than once, methinks. That realization (sheesh, you’d think top editors would be more aware of the creeping nonfactness in newspapers) and the Albom flap prompted her to institute, according to the Eagle:

• Sending verification letters to people quoted in stories chosen at random after publication to ask how accurate the story was.

• Starting a program to verify and fact-check articles after publication.

• Reworking the ethics policy to further clarify the rules on attribution.

That second one … How about greater emphasis on verifying and fact-checking stories before publication? Isn’t that what the damn copy desk is supposed to do?

Conceiving stories; collecting information; sorting it for fact vs. falsehood; writing stories clearly, accurately and with a certain degree of charm; editing them; verifying them; and making sound judgments about them is billed these days as more complicated, more prone to “soundly guessing” about veracity of anonymous sources that it was back in my old newsroom days.

But it really isn’t. Forgive the cliches, but in the rush to judgments newspapers make because of the perceived competitive pressures of other media (such as newspapers’ own damn web sites), newspapers have forgotten what used to make them credible — getting it right instead of getting it first.

If they want to get it right, then all these post-Albom, post-Newsweek, post-scandal-of-the-week correctives ought to be applied long before publication.

Instead of giving us what-we’re-gonna-do-to-get-it-right speeches, just get it right. Hire more reporters. Give them more time on stories. Hire more copy editors. Give journalists more time and more resources to get it right.

But we know that’s not going to happen. Newspapers’ editorial staffs these days shrink, not grow. The number of working print journalists has declined since 2001. Instead of attacking circulation woes by producing better journalism (meaning more editions where getting it right is the mission), newspaper owners launch marketing campaigns to address the decline in readership.

So I’m still flunking students for getting it wrong. I hope the sour taste of getting it wrong protects them in their professional lives where the consequences should be far higher.

I don’t expect the current level of journalistic semifactness to rise any time soon. Too few horses are pulling too many wagons.

As my good friend and colleague Pat Vecchio has said: “How do you expect to do the big stuff if you can’t or won’t do the little stuff?”

That’s the problem. If Newsweek and other news organizations aren’t accustomed to attending closely to the little stuff, how can we believe them on the big stuff?

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