The year in corrections
From the ridiculous to the sublime, here’s a look back at the Star’s 2015 year in faux pas
You’ve got to laugh. You gotta love it. As a new year begins with a clean slate on errors in the Star and the certainty that silly, embarrassing, sometimes laughable, mistakes will be published in the year ahead, it’s time for one last look back at the Star’s 2015 year in corrections.
Our cringeworthy “correction of the year” addressed an embarrassing error in the Star’s report of the death last April of the beloved Lois Lilienstein, of the internationally popular children’s singing group Sharon, Lois and Bram.
Two generations of fans — baby boom parents and their millennial children — who (like me and my kids) watched Sharon, Lois and Bram’s The Elephant Show on TV in the 1980s and 1990s well know the signature song “Skinnamarink” that ended every show. And, of course, those endearing “I love you” hand motions that accompanied the song.
Not so the reporter who in reporting on Lilienstein’s death at age 78 from a rare form of cancer, told you that “Generations sang the nonsense song ‘Skinnamarinky Dinky Dink’ along with the trio about how they would ‘love it in the morning and in the afternoon, love it in the evening and underneath the moon’.”
Not quite right. As the reader who first brought this groaner to our attention put it, “Your reporter is possibly the only person in Canada who doesn’t know the lyrics to ‘Skinnamarink’.” Indeed, that error led to an awkwardly worded, widely shared correction that told you, “In fact, the signature song stated, ‘I love you in the morning and in the afternoon . . . love you in the evening . . . ,’ not ‘love it . . .’ ”
Runner-up for the “you gotta laugh” correction of 2015 was a real dog. In May, the Star reported on a Ryerson University forum on divisions within cities and quoted Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie about why it would be impractical for her to take up a challenge to live in social housing for a month, as saying, ‘I have a big dog’.”
Not quite right. As the correction told you, in fact, Crombie said, “I have a big job.”
Much to the chagrin of all here, the Star again mangled too many names in 2015. We reported incorrectly that a Second World War soldier who served with the fabled Devil’s Brigade commando unit was named Meyer Doobie. In fact, the honourable war veteran is Myer Goobie. Just a week after Toronto police appointed its new chief of police, the Star referred wrongly to Chief “Mike” Sanders. Of course, he is Mark Saunders.
As in the past, factual errors in 2015 included inaccurate information about geography, history, politics, science, sports. As always, we corrected too many mistakes that really annoy readers — wrong phone numbers and incorrect times and locations.
Dumb mistakes of geography included a report about the Cricket World Cup in “Christchurch, Australia.” Right hemisphere, wrong country: The host city for the cricket match was Christchurch, New Zealand. Then there was the Travel photo caption that located Mount Ararat in Armenia instead of in eastern Turkey, near the country’s border with Armenia and Iran.
Wrong numbers resulted in a number of Star corrections. We told you — incorrectly — that the world’s largest tunnel boring machine, known as Bertha, has a cutting head that weighs 2,000 pounds. In fact, big Bertha is somewhat bigger than first reported, weighing in at 2,000 tonnes.
From understatement to deadly overstatement: In August, the Star reported that the rubber bullets supplied to police forces across North America by an Oakville-based company weigh 46 ounces. In fact they weigh substantially less — about 47 grams.
Make no mistake, despite my gentle guffaws about these relatively minor mistakes, accuracy and corrections are a serious business at the Star — and certainly enough was said in this space in past months about the more serious errors of 2015. We track and monitor corrections throughout the year. In coming days I will share the 2015 corrections data, compiled by public editor associate Maithily Panchalingam, with the Star’s publisher and editor.
Overall in 2015, the Star published 870 corrections to remedy mistakes in print and online content — 374 for errors in the newspaper and 496 to fix website mistakes. That is a 6-per-cent increase from last year’s tally of 823.
Print corrections dropped about 15 per cent from the 435 newspaper corrections of 2014. Not surprisingly, given the amount of content published 24/7 online, website errors jumped in 2015 — more than 25 per cent from 388 in 2014. That increase could well also be partially due to our efforts to better track online-only corrections.
Since launching Star Touch in mid-September, we published 75 corrections to tablet content, with many of those errors also appearing in print and online. We will re-engineer our tracking methods in 2016 to monitor “tablet-only” corrections for next year’s corrections report.
As a new year begins, I can predict with all certainty that the complexities of multi-platform publishing guarantee there will be more mistakes ahead. Some serious, some laughable.
As always, the Star regrets all the errors. publiced@thestar.ca