06/11/2021
By Kate Stone Lombardi
I remember the first time a reader requested a correction for an article I wrote.
At the time, I was a “copy girl” for The New York Times. This was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and newspapers were only print, and editors barked “COPY!” loudly. As a copy girl, my job was to fill their boxes with copy paper. At the time, I already had a masters degree in journalism but that’s how you started at The Times.
The group of us copy girls and boys were an over-educated, highly competitive group. We didn’t only race to keep editors happy with their paper trays. We hustled to try to make our way up the food chain. At the time, we were allowed to try to write two kinds of stories. One was the Neediest Case Fund stories. The other was to come up with a story that wasn’t under anybody else’s beat.
Just try to find a story that someone at the NYT wasn’t already responsible for covering. Well, I finally did. My story – “Fencing Club Celebrates 100th Anniversary” was published – without a byline of course. Only staff reporters got bylines.
Anyway, one day I was working in Metro and someone yelled out, “Who wrote the fencing story?” Proudly I called out, “I did!” With which the editor yelled, “You screwed up!” for the entire desk (and a desk is a department) to hear. I don’t remember the mistake – a title? a misspelled name? But it involved running a correction, and I assumed marked the end of my journalism career.
I lived to publish again, but this week might be the first that I’m grateful that most journalism is digital now. I just published a big piece online for a national magazine, and it has needed three corrections. Oy. One was for calling a hospital a hospital, instead of a “health center.” One was for a job title missing a word. One was someone referring to “FaceTime” which I’d heard as “Facebook.”
They are all legitimate boo-boos. But when I went crawling to my editor to confess, she said, “No problem. I’ll fix it in a minute.” Boom, she typed in the corrections and hit “publish.” Boom, no more mistakes. No formal correction. No major humiliation for the entire organization to discover.
I still hate making mistakes in anything I write, but now they’re not carved in stone. Okay, I’m not that old. But they certainly are easier to address.
I still hate making mistakes in anything I write, but now they’re not carved in stone. Okay, I’m not that old. But they certainly are easier to address.