To correct and serve

 For many years at The Baltimore Sun my hands were the ones through which corrections moved into the paper. 

Errors of fact, either identified internally or through readers' complaints, were written by reporters or editors, approved by the managing editor, and sent to me for final examination before publication. We were scrupulous about this because, despite the nighttime telephone calls denouncing us as a filthy liberal rag, factual accuracy was important. 

And yes, we had errors of fact. Names misspelled, the fundamental error in journalism. Math lapses. (Always calculate the percentage yourself.) I sent through the correction on a features story that informed readers that carbon MONoxide would stop hiccups. (Technically, of course it will, but ...)

There is a widespread superstition among newspaper people that the original error cannot be repeated in the correction--probably an extension of the sound judgment that in apologizing for a libel it is good not to repeat the libel. But after we ran a correction telling no more than that a photo caption the previous day was of the wrong sea turtle, the editor decreed that we must repeat the error when it is necessary to make the correction comprehensible. 

The Sun took collective responsibility for errors rather than name the person responsible, which irritated reporters when an editor had been at fault: "It's my byline on the story, and readers will think I made the error." While I was sympathetic to the complaint, it remains a fact that what is published is a collective work, and reporters don't mind taking credit for stories that have been improved in editing.

(I once saw a story that passed through so many hands in repeated bouts of editing that the version sent to the copy desk for publication may not have contained a single sentence as originally written by the reporter. I was briefly tempted to write after the reporter's byline "as told to The Baltimore Sun." And no, I am not naming names. My entire career was devoted to concealing writers' and editors' shortcomings, and it is too late to start now.) 

From time to time, the paper was moved to publish a clarification rather than a correction. The point of a clarification is that while the published article was factually accurate, it had been written in a way that permitted an inaccurate inference.

Errors of grammar and usage of infelicities of prose were not subject to published corrections. They were instead dealt with in the in-house newsletter that I wrote, Publish and Be Damned.

In the case of this blog, and the one I published for years at baltimoresun.com, I had no copy editor, so crowdsourcing identified my lapses. I always promptly and gratefully accepted corrections. (There was one point late in my tenure at The Sun when I pissed off one of my masters and was instructed to have another editor vet my posts, but the supervision was cursory.) 

The unvarying form of the correction always ended with "The Sun regrets the error." And so did I.