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Update: On The Mistakes We Keep Making

In June, we put a spotlight on the number of mistakes we make and set a goal to cut them in half by October.

We haven't gotten worse.

But the pace – 100 or so corrections per month – hasn't slowed. The types of mistakes we most often make haven't changed. They include:

  • Misspelled names.
  • Mistaken locations.
  • Messed up titles.
  • Miscalculated numbers.
  • Mangled histories.
  • In coming months, we'll hold training sessions to talk about fact-checking and share best practices. As an editor at another news outlet told me recently, "this is a problem we'll never solve – but we can get better." The sessions should help.

    In the meantime, use the NPR Accuracy Checklist to "CQ" your stories and scripts. I have more of the cards or you can download one from here: https://training.npr.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The-NPR-Accuracy-Checklist_3x5in_horizontal_v21.pdf

    Also, we've created a #corrections channel on Slack. It's not public. It's for NPR folks. Please follow it to see the types of mistakes we make. Knowing what we've gotten wrong will hopefully help us avoid repeating errors.

    Finally, we'll try to a better job celebrating success – such as the steps taken Saturday by Weekend Edition producer Ian Stewart.

    Jim Kane tells us that Ian "alertly noticed that a member station reporter had written a woman's first name differently from how he actually tracked it. Ian pointed it out to me, and then woke both the reporter and the editor to confirm that the tracked version was correct — less than an hour before air time. That's just the kind of vigilance we need, and waking the two on a Saturday morning was FAR better than having to correct the story after the fact."

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.