Make no mistake...
BY Tracey Lindeman
Montreal-based journalist Craig Silverman is a special kind of perfectionist. The founder of correction-cataloguing blog, Regret the Error, has written hundreds of articles for papers such as The Globe and Mail and The New York Times, and has only been personally responsible for five corrections. That’s five too many if you ask him. “The truth is that I need to be getting 100 percent accuracy.”
A correction that ran in Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader—which offered a simple “we regret the omission” for not covering the civil rights movement—inspired Silverman to launch the website. But most of the time, RegretTheError.com is filled with newspapers’ mathematical slip-ups, cases of mistaken identity and lackluster apologies for some pretty big boo-boos.
His objective isn’t to point fingers, though; he’d rather prod reporters and their editors to get it right the first time. “Accuracy is not an expensive thing,” says Silverman. “You don’t have to go out and buy a multi-million dollar accuracy machine.”
Regret the Error will also be released as a book in November.
