To err is human; to insert a terrible typo takes a journalist

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/11/2022 (1422 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The thing about writing for newspapers is, there will be typos.

It doesn’t matter how many eyeballs have seen a piece. One will squeak in there, somewhere. We’re working fast, which is maybe another reason why they call journalism “the first rough draft of history.” Not just because we’re documenting things as they happen, but because there are almost certainly typos in it.

The worst typos are the ones that can Houdini out of safety guardrails such as spell checkers. I don’t think there’s a journalist among us who has not lived in mortal fear of calling it the Pubic Safety Building. Especially since someone, at some point, has definitely called it the Pubic Safety Building.

I have a special anxiety about messing up people’s names and other proper nouns, either via typo or outright error.

When I was in journalism school, students failed their entire assignment if a proper noun was spelled incorrectly. Instructors would also rub a little salt in the wound by letting you know what mark you would have received had you not been so careless. How quickly an A — OK, fine, a B+ — becomes an F.

I failed an assignment for spelling only once — which I think is the idea — because I trusted a little boy at a hockey game to spell the name of his hometown correctly. R-O-S-N-O-R-T. He had forgotten the “e.”I didn’t know the “e” existed. I was 19 years old and had never heard of Rosenort.

I thought I was a genius for even asking him how to spell it. I didn’t think to, you know, look it up. And I certainly didn’t think to add the context that Rosenort is located about 47 kilometres south of Winnipeg. (Oh God, is it? Better double check.)

Thank goodness for copy editors, those unsung heroes who save us reporters from ourselves every day. How many near-misses do we not even know about? How many “Pubic Safety Buildings” never made it to print because of these hawk-eyed people?

A special thanks, too, to all the English teachers and word nerds who have emailed me over the years. I will never use the word “countless” to describe things that can, in fact, be counted ever again. (I kid, but you make me better, too.)

The newspaper is still made, from scratch, every day, by human beings.

Over the Free Press’s 150 year history, technology has obviously improved and the way we put together the paper has changed. But what hasn’t changed is the fact that the newspaper is still made, from scratch, every day, by human beings. The repeated words, the transposed letters — all those typos are little reminders of that humanity.

I realize that makes them sound cute, when they really are quite annoying. It’s never a good feeling to find a typo, however small and who-cares it is, in a piece you’ve worked on for hours. It’s especially brutal if you find said typo literally years after the fact. Typos are more easily erased online, but they are immortalized in print.

Newspapers are strange in that they are both permanent record and ephemera. Fish wrap. Next day’s recycling. Sometimes, to really keep myself humble, I imagine a wobbly-legged puppy piddling on that column I spent too many hours overthinking.

Newspapers are strange in that they are both permanent record and ephemera.

It’s fun to imagine my inky words being used to pack up someone’s treasures in a move. Or becoming splattered in paint and glitter in service of a kindergarten craft. Once, I peeled back the layers of newspaper protecting a bouquet of birthday tulips and was met by my own face, smiling up at me.

For writers, working at a daily paper is one big lesson in letting go. Moving on. What’s next? There’s no time to chew the cud, as it were. And so, we must tune out that niggling voice most of us has, insistent as a heartbeat — you could have written it better, it could always be better — and get on with it. That’s the job.

The late Buzz Currie, a former editor at the Free Press, put it well: “Write your story and file it. Do not file it and keep writing it.”

We want our stories to inform, of course. But we also want the writing to be clear and engaging, to sparkle. This isn’t in service of our own egos (OK, maybe it is, a little). It’s for you, the reader.

We know that hours of work becomes minutes of reading and we want those minutes to matter. We know that whatever we wrote will be read, enjoyed (or not) and then forgotten. By us, too: I occasionally find articles with my byline on them that I have no memory of writing. There’s just too much. But, on a really good day, we’ll write something that sticks with a reader for much longer.

In that way, working at a daily newspaper is also a gift. Every day is a new opportunity to show up for our readers, a chance to do better than we did yesterday. Because there’s always a tomorrow.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com