Adam B. Sullivan — editor-in-chief of the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa’s student paper — did something rather interesting this week.
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.
Admittedly, those are pretty bad errors. Clearly, the Daily Iowan needed help.
Adam writes:
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.
