Too many errors? Trying harder to get it right

We took a lot of heat – and rightly so – for the recent “I have a deam” headline on the Editorial page.

Some readers and letter writers noted that the headline was just one of many bloopers that appear in the newspaper. They’re right about that, too.

So are these errors occurring because the people we hire to write and edit copy are poorly trained compared to people who sat in their chairs twenty years ago? Are we too short-staffed? In the too-frequent cases of subject-verb disagreement, do Telegraph staffers simply not care about the English language? Don’t we realize that misspelling a name makes readers wonder what else we might have wrong? In the end, don’t these mistakes, which at a minimum make us look sloppy, also affect our credibility?

One letter writer responding to the “I have a deam” headline allowed as how we all make mistakes and suggested we get on with matters of more substance.

I appreciate that reader.

But . . . some of us in today’s newsroom may not be as disciplined about language usage as our predecessors. Multitasking has meant a little less focus on one craft as we ply another; blogging and the instant posting of breaking news online doesn’t breed accuracy (Note my own use of pour instead of poor in a recent blog entry). Almost every editor in the country will say his or her newsroom could use more staff.

Still, journalists at the Telegraph do care about the English language and good grammar, and they care about accuracy. We are scared to death that we are hurting our credibility one garbled headline at a time, one wrong address or phone number at a time. No one gets a pass. All of us at the paper who touch copy – and there are many of us - need to be more careful.

Let me say it before the most cynical of you do (is there any one more cynical than a journalist?): You don’t care why it happens, you just want it to stop.

We agree. We’re going to work harder to prevent errors. And we’re going to do a better job of tracking errors – as a way of holding each other accountable and, most importantly, learning from our mistakes.

When we fall short, as we will, we expect you’ll let us know. That, too, should help set us on a better path.