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I hate making mistakes. I hate when IBJ makes mistakes.
But I do not hate corrections. I think they are among the most important things we do.
This is on my mind after I had coffee with a couple of IBJ readers recently and one alerted me to a mistake we made in a sports column about Caitlin Clark.
We said WNBA star Breanna Stewart plays for Seattle. She doesn’t. She played for Seattle from 2016-2022 and then moved to the New York Liberty for the 2023 season, where she won the league’s Most Valuable Player award. Earlier this year, Stewart re-signed with the Liberty.
The column’s author, Derek Schultz, learned about the mistake before my coffee meeting and had immediately contacted an editor, who immediately fixed the story online and added a correction to the bottom of it.
Speed in correcting the error doesn’t excuse the error, of course. But our goal is to correct mistakes as quickly as possible. It’s the only way we can maintain our credibility with readers.
My coffee date didn’t know the error had been fixed online. She had read the column in the printed IBJ, where she had torn out the page and circled the sentence in preparation for seeing me. Her best chance of knowing that we recognized the mistake is seeing the correction printed in this week’s paper.
It’s not a perfect system.
But it does rely in part on readers to let us know when we get things wrong. Interestingly, people are eager to tell us when we leave out a word or misspell a name, which are mistakes that, of course, need to be corrected. Last week, for example, we misspelled Penske in a headline in Eight@8. All mistakes are embarrassing, but that one—whew!—it wasn’t good. And within minutes, I had multiple emails and texts alerting me that we had gotten it wrong.
But sources and readers are less likely to tell us if we get something more substantial wrong—and by substantial, I mean something that is factually incorrect or leaves readers with the wrong impression about what we’re writing about. We will make those kinds of mistakes. The journalists at IBJ and Inside INdiana Business write and edit tens of thousands of words every week, often about complicated issues and complex financial dealings.
Sometimes our mistakes are obvious, sometimes subtle. Sometimes the mistake is more about context and tone, which is often much harder to correct.
Please know that our goal is to get it right in all ways. All the stories that go in print are read by an editor and then a copy editor. After they are laid out on a page, they go to another copy editor for review. And IBJ reporters have a chance to review the edited versions of their stories on the page to try to catch errors. There are a few other checks in the process as well, all with the goal of stopping mistakes from getting into the paper.
Online, where we’re typically working on breaking news with much shorter deadlines, all stories go through editors, but there are fewer pre-publishing checks. However, we are constantly tinkering with those stories, adding, subtracting and correcting information as the news changes or we learn about information that will make a story more accurate.
We want you to tell us when you don’t think we’ve gotten it right. Send an email to webteam@ibj.com if you need to alert us to a story on the web that needs a fix. Email me at lweidenbener@ibj.com and Samm Quinn at squinn@ibj.com if you see things in print that need to be addressed. We want to get it right.•
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Weidenbener is editor of IBJ. Email her at lweidenbener@ibj.com.
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