My biggest screw-up

We asked colleagues in the journalism field to tell us about their most memorable journalistic gaffes or foul-ups, as a note of warning to citizen journalists about the importance of checking and double-checking your facts. Here are some of their stories:

That sinking feeling

In my first daily newspaper job, I was assigned to write about a company in our small city. I misspelled the name of the company wrong all the way through the article. (At least I was consistent.)

The next morning the managing editor called me into a small conference room and told me what I’d done. I felt about one inch tall.

I called the owner of the business and apologized abjectly. He was polite about it, which was more than I expected.

I never, ever made that again.

—Dan Gillmor

Can you spell your name?

Years ago, while reporting a store on competition in the furniture industry, I called a local store - “W. Levy Furniture” - to request an interview. The person on the phone said I needed to speak to Mr. Levy. I set up an appointment and went to the store, where I was introduced to Mr. Levy.

“Are you the owner?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How do you spell your first name?”

“W-A-L-T-E-R”

The interview continued from there, but I never asked him about his last name and quoted him as Walter Levy. He called to complain the next day that his name was “Loewy,” if memory serves. Yes, the store was named for his family, but Levy was easier than “Loewy” for marketing reasons.

Now, I always ask a person to spell first and last name, even if it’s something like “Bob Smith,” and even if I’ve seen it many times before.

—a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter

Don’t assume

I once misspelled a sheriff’s name. He was incredibly media unfriendly and I was incredibly new on the job. It was a murder case and I had been trying to reach him all day and finally got a call back at about 8:30 p.m. He was the sheriff on the edge off our coverage area (that’s my excuse for having never heard of him).

I asked him his name, as the investigating officer had just told me to call “the sheriff.”

He said, “Paul.”

I said, “Paul, what?”

He said, “Paul Ger”

I said, “Can you spell that, please?”

Getting increasingly gruff, he said, “Paul—like Paul, G-E-R. ” Or at least that’s what I thought he said.

I quoted a Sheriff Paul Ger. And that’s how it ran.

Sheriff Paul Paulger’s secretary called me the next morning to ask for a correction.

This happened in an Internet-free newsroom in Richmond, Ind. in 1996, late at night. I remember it painfully like it was yesterday.

—Amanda Long, Washington Business Journal

‘The worst day of my career’

Here’s an account of the worst day of my career. Some good should come out of it!:

I was at the South Milwaukee Voice Graphic, a weekly community newspaper for a city of about 22,000. I hadn’t been there very long when election night rolled around, and I hadn’t ever covered local government before accepting that job. Talk about a recipe for disaster!

My editor chose to take a week off to go shopping in New York over election week, and nobody on the copy desk knew enough to catch my mistake, and so I wrote and had published a story saying that the incumbent alderman had lost his seat on the council.

Sadly, there are TWO seats for every district, and he came in second—thereby actually retaining his seat.

The entire town was furious with me! I got very heated calls from the mayor, the mayor’s wife, etc. The offended alderman actually was very gracious, but his wife was pissed at me, too. And of course, being relatively new on the job, it was not a good way to impress people.

I hung up with the mayor, went to the bathroom, and cried so hard that I literally left a puddle on the floor. Absolutely devastated. My cube-mate came in the next day, casually tossed off a “how’s it going,” I burst into tears, and he instantly soothed me by saying it was a fender-bender, not a fatality. Nobody died, and yes, my credibility took a hit, but it would recover. I have always been grateful for that. And six months down the road, nobody remembered the incident.

Moral of the story: Learn as much as you can about what you’re writing about before you sit down to write!

—Candy Czernicki, Burnsville (Minn.) Sun Current

About that snake

Today I received an email from a Fijian about a photo and caption I posted a few years ago. Kappy wrote:

“You have a picture of a banded snake with the caption: ‘A water snake, said to be harmless, on Beachcomber Island, Fiji.’ Actually, this snake is called a dadakalaci in Fijian and is a sea snake. However, it is also one of the MOST POISONOUS snakes in the world. I wouldn’t want anyone to pick one up because they thought they weren’t dangerous, get bitten and die within minutes.”

Oops.

—JD Lasica, Social Media Podcast

The Great Gretzky Gaffe

One night while I was a young front-page designer for The Detroit News, we were pushing a tight deadline. At the time, we were using Macs to paginate the newspaper. As stories and headlines were cleared through the copy desk, they would be sent from the old mainframe system to the Mac. The stories and headlines were then imported into the QuarkXPress pages.

When we were pushing deadline, the news editor would sometimes dictate the headlines to me instead of transmitting the text to me. It would shave some time off the process. On this day, there was an announcement right before deadline that hockey legend Wayne Gretzky was retiring. So we replaced the top refer in the upper left hand side of the page. As you may or may not know, Detroit is sometimes referred to as Hockeytown because of Detroit’s fanatical love (and domination) of the sport.

Well, I’m embarrassed to say that I misspelled Gretzky’s last name and the proofreaders didn’t catch it and it went through three editions (the majority of the press run) before a copy editor caught the mistake.

The next day, the news editor wanted to take the blame saying that he didn’t follow the appropriate workflow. But I insisted on taking the blame because I have never been more ashamed of a mistake. That error, however, taught me a lot about how everyone needs to take responsibility for all aspects of the news product. And it was a painful reminder of the old journalism maxim - accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. Ever since, if I have an inkling of doubt about a fact or spelling, I double and triple check it.

—Shayne Bowman, Hypergene Media Solutions

Stop the presses

When I was Sunday news editor of the combined San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle, we had a story about the California condor and another about the Pope. The captions got swapped on the composing room floor. So under the Pope, it read: “Soon to be an endangered species.” It was the only time in my career, I got to pick up the phone and shout, “Stop the presses.”

— Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine

Shorthand

I once wrote a story about the background of a land developer in Oakland.

I looked at my notes from an interview, saw “phil housing development,” or something like that, and wrote about how the land developer had previously built a housing project in the Philippines.

The housing project was in Philadelphia.

— Paul Grabowicz, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

When a Hoover is not a Hoover

Many years ago in a book review I meant to refer to former President Herbert Hoover and instead wrote J. Edgar Hoover, the more famous (or infamous) former head of the FBI. Reader letters ensued. What hurt most was that some implied that I didn’t know the difference! But I had the president in mind all the time! In this case, an equally sloppy editor let it get into print.

Incredibly, I actually made the same mistake a second time in a piece a few years later, and again an editor failed to save me. I’m now gun-shy of ever mentioning either man in print again!

An editor (whether she or he carries that title or not) obviously can do much more than catch spelling, grammatical, or even factual errors. An editor can challenge assumptions, point out missing information, suggest how to untangle confusing passages — or even direct you toward where the story REALLY lies.

—Gregory M. Lamb, Christian Science Monitor

Three vignettes

At cbsnews.com during the 1996 presidential election campaign, I wrote a historical piece on previous campaigns and used Nixon’s name throughout the Reagan section and vice versa. The scary part is that no one on staff caught it nor did any readers write in to correct me. I didn’t catch it until a week later crawling into bed after a 16-hour day and it struck me out of nowhere - OH, MY GOD.

In those days, when the web was still primitive, we hand-coded pages and couldn’t access anything from home, so I couldn’t fix it until the next morning. You know I got no sleep that night.

Here’s a really small one, but may be illustrative of the little things that can make readers/listeners/viewers distrust you about everything else:

1985. Warsaw. Barbara Walters interviewing General Jaruzelski for “20/20” on the occasion of the lifting of martial law after he had put down Solidarity two years earlier. It was still a Communist country and difficult to get phone calls back and forth to New York. We’d been asked to have Barbara record an intro to another piece that would air the same night, something about long-haul truckers. Couldn’t get many details because of the phone problems and no way to get ahold of that segment’s producer. So I wrote the copy with the few notes I had, and we shot Barbara doing the intro on an overpass in Warsaw above a busy highway.

I don’t know anything at all about trucks. Nothin’. So when I needed a synonym for truck, I used “ten-wheeler.” Well, you probably know they have a whole lot more wheels than that (I’ve forgotten how many), but we shipped off the tape to New York and there was no fixing it. Somehow, the executive producer got a phone call through to Warsaw to ream me about that one.

Here’s one more. It’s about Barbara Walters, but she’s told it publicly (not to mention that it aired live):

Way back in the 1970s when she was the first woman anchor on the “Today” show, Barbara was interviewing someone who’d just returned from Lambarene in Africa. I have no memory about what. In discussing his trip about whatever, he mentioned Albert Schweitzer who, of course, ran a clinic there for many years. Barbara asked: And how is Dr. Schweitzer? The poor guy, not wanting to embarrass Barbara, fumphed and humphed around and finally had to say, “Well, Barbara, he died two years ago.”

—Ronni Bennett, Timegoesby.net

Duped by the Kid-Porn Vigilante

Excerpted from Adam Penenberg’s Feb. 8, 1999 Open letter to the hacking community:

Last week, Steve Silberman of Wired News called to tell me he and I and some other journalists had been duped by a pseudo-hacker named Christian Valor, AKA se7en. In April 1998, I’d posted a piece on the Forbes Digital Tool web site about Valor’s kiddie porn vigilantism and the fact that law enforcement knew what he was doing, but turned a blind eye. Cool story. Too bad it turned out not to be true.

I was certainly in good company. Steve also had written about Valor’s exploits, as had Newsday, the Independent in London, etc. Both Steve and I received letters from se7en’s ex-girlfriend simultaneously last week, but Steve got on to the story first. I was out of town. Sad to say, he and I were the only ones to respond to her letter. I told Steve I wouldn’t post anything until his story hit. (See “Kid-Porn Vigilante Hacked Media”).

I can’t comment on how the Steve or the Independent or Newsday conducted their research, but I would like to share with all of you how I did mine, and what went wrong. I’m sure there are lessons to be learned.

As you may or may not know, I am no stranger to taking on journalists I think have concocted stories out of thin air. I broke the Stephen Glass story, the associate editor of The New Republic who made up a story on hackers and was later discovered to have made up some three dozen stories for a number of well-known publications (See “Lies, damn lies and fiction”). I also took on Beth Piskora of The New York Post, who I believe made up a sexy tech story on Organized Crime setting up phony companies for Y2K remediation, who then, she claims, inserted software to divert money from bank accounts (read: clients) to mob-controlled accounts. (See “Phantom mobsters”). This canard was picked up by Vanity Fair in a recent feature on Y2K. Vanity Fair has yet to admit it published a lie.

I hate it when you nail a journalist and instead of coming clean, he or she hides. This is what both Glass and Piskora have done. That’s why I’m writing this note.

For my story (Vigilante hacker), I knew I couldn’t get on IRC and traffic in kiddie porn on a Forbes computer. You remember what happened to that journalist for NPR who did, and now had to plead guilty to a felony all because he was ostensibly researching a story? So I relied on law enforcement, EHAP, and NAMBLA. I called literally 10 law enforcement officials who said they studied under Valor in one of his security courses. On the record, they would all vouch for se7en’s hacking skills. Off the record, they all said they knew what he was doing but they didn’t care. Everyone hates kiddie porn traffickers.

I also talked to EHAP, and they told me they were distressed by se7en’s actions, because it gave hackers a bad name. Se7en should turn them over to the cops or the ISPs, they said, not break the law in going after them. They didn’t say he was a fraud.

I also contacted NAMBLA through its web site. I asked if anyone knew a hacker named se7en, who was purportedly going after kiddie porn traffickers on IRC. I received a cryptic response, something along the lines of, “Yes, some of our members have been complaining about this guy. We just want to be left alone.” End of conversation. He refused to turn over any other details.

So I felt confident that with all this cross-checking that Valor was who he said he was. Obviously, I made a mistake. I think the most important lesson I learned is that law enforcement doesn’t have a clue what really goes on in hacking circles; they are not good sources for this. I also now won’t write a hacking story unless I can meet the hacker face-to-face and actually see evidence that I can then verify with other hackers—or computer security experts I trust. This is how I approached my story for Forbes magazine on the NY Times hack that ran last fall (“We were long gone when he pulled the plug.”)

If you want to send me taunting email, telling me what a fool I was, feel free. But you can’t possibly be harder on me than I’ve been on myself this past week. You live, you learn.

—Adam Penenberg Senior Editor, Forbes Magazine

A budget is a budget

The best story that comes to mind is the time at the Orange County Register—maybe in 94 or so?—when Marc Lifsher (then of the Register) wrote a budget story out of Sacramento, then by mistake sent to his editor the story he’d written exactly one year earlier—and the editor (Dennis Foley, ironically now the ombudsman there) put it in the paper. But you can’t source that one to me!

—Anonymous

A musical low note

My favorite is the night on the Bee copy desk when, between editions, I changed a B1 headline containing the word “voila” to “viola”—because I thought “voila” looked wrong. I had a similar screw up with altar/alter in a church story.

—Ed Murrieta

Devil’s advocates

As a new reporter almost 20 years ago, I was asked to fill in for the city council beat writer and cover the council meeting of a small town. Just get the highlight, I was told. The council debated an issue (I can’t even remember what it was, new sidewalks or sewers or something). I verified the names of the key council members, talked to the law director, who said to me “You’ve got this straight right? This was complicated.”

I replied: “Yes, Joe Blow says this and wants such and such, and Jim Smith says this and wants this and that.”

“Exactly,” replied the law director, patting me on the shoulder.

The next day, the mayor called me. I’d gotten the entire story backward. Joe Blow and friends wanted this and that, while Jim Smith and cohorts wanted such and such.

How could that be? I verified the statements with the councilmen and the law director, too.

“Well,” the mayor replied, “everyone was playing devil’s advocate and arguing each other’s side. I guess that would be confusing. And the law director is a little senile.”

So, befuddled me had to write another story to clarify the whole thing.

—Dennis Robaugh, Southtown managing editor

Check the basics

I write a column for www.wehonews.com that mostly centers on historic preservation. My lovely sis sent me an email stating that the famous Witch House (The Spadena home) in Beverly Hills had been razed! It’s a storybook style fantasy confection set amongst Palladian villas and Tudor giants. My anger grew to previously unknown proportion, and I immediately notified my co-workers via email of the tragedy, condemning Beverly Hills and all those within. That evening I crafted a heartfelt column on the lack of concern for the past that was manifest in this destruction. My friends and cohorts began calling and stating that someone should go down for this abomination.

The next morning, I decided to take a brief detour from West Hollywood to a friends house nearby and passed the Walden Street address of the Spadena House. Still standing. Under renovation, but thoroughly intact. Sister had been past the house 100 times, and still cannot explain her error. I almost published without the most basic kind of fact checking, seeing if the basic premise of the article was true! I trusted Sister with no hesitation. Morale: he who does not hesitate is lost. I stopped the article going out. It could easily have been too late, and my credibility as a journo would have taken a monstrous hit. Check everything!

—Roy Rogers Oldenkamp, http://www.wehonews.com (West Hollywood News)

Don’t overly rely on your recorder

I was doing a story in college about a malpractice lawsuit against the university clinic. I had just had surgery on my hand and was in a cast so I was trying to take notes, but mostly relying on a tape recorder. That night, when I was writing the story, I was flying through the tape, grabbing quotes here and there based on my scratchy notes. I ended up quoting one person as saying something to the effect of “everybody makes mistakes” and attributed to the clinic’s spokeswoman. Turns out it was me on the tape saying that, in a question I was posing to the doctor and the spokeswoman. We ran a front-page retraction and I’ve never really been able to think about it without cringing. The lesson is to never rely solely on a tape recorder and always, always double check quotes. Yikes.

—the managing editor of an online news site

Public’s right to know

I’ve made many gaffes in my short journalism career. One stands out, but not for its egregiousness nor its placement in the paper. No, of all the ones that got away, the one I really messed up came when a public official at the state’s Department of Public Safety was fired. No explanation was given, and a call made to his deputy (also fired) was curtly redirected to her deposed supervisor and then cut off.

So. Something was fishy, and no one was talking. After finagling out the name and address of the fired official, I finally got a response. He answered the phone and, being a lawyer, avoided saying anything to indicate why he was let go.

Upon pressing him, he hit me with something out of the blue: “Why do you want to know?”

A perfectly decent question. Actually, a crucial one, perhaps one that goes to the heart of journalism. I can excuse myself by saying I was in college, or blame inexperience, but the fact is I should have hit him right away with all those glorious tenets of the craft that had been so artfully imparted upon me by the storied professors of the Missouri School of Journalism. Instead, I got blindsided and sputtered something about beating the other paper in town.

“It sounds like a competition to me,” the official said. “I don’t think so.”

To this day, I still reflect on that goof-up from a year and a half ago. Thanks, this was therapeutic.

—Nigel Duara, Montgomery Advertiser