BREAKING NEWS: There are mistakes in The Daily Iowan.
About once every other week, we publish a correction about a factual error in our coverage. Even more often than that, we notice copy-editing errors. When an error is big — headlines or graphics, usually — we sometimes stumble upon a vigilante copy editor pointing out our error on Twitter or Facebook. One diligent reader even recently went so far as to make a blog post and photo slideshow of a week’s worth of the errors he found.
While we’re never happy to see the mistakes and many of our critics are needlessly inflammatory when they point out mistakes, we do take the complaints seriously. Poor copy editing damages our credibility — something we already struggle with as a “student publication.”
So instead of getting salty that a blogger was promoting our mistakes, I emailed him and offered him a job as the associate copy editor. He accepted and will start in two weeks. He obviously has a good eye for detail and I’m hopeful the new position will cut down on the embarrassing errors that creep into the print edition.
