Meeting/Speech -- Five Fatals? Eff That.

Fatals happen when you least expect 'em, and usually it's not the big things that trip you up; it's the small things that are hidden in plain sight.

Up to now we've had nine people have fact fatals on 19 occasions. That's an average of two fatals per person. So if you're freaking out that you've had a couple of fatals, guess what? You are average.

Plus, typically in my classes the majority of fatals happen in the first half of the semester; the rate goes down as people get more comfortable with balancing speed with accuracy, which you only learn one way: by doing. And making the sort of mistakes you are right now. We're working it out of your system. So even if you've had more than the average, we are identifying where your weak spots are so we can work on fixing those areas.

Let's start by looking at the latest goofs.

In the meeting exercise, there was a case where the name of one of the speakers was misspelled.

The rest of the fatals came in the speech assignment. There was a misspelling that created a new and unintended word that changed meaning. That's something we've seen before.

There was a dropped digit that created a different number than the one you intended to use; a number than you intended to be in the tens of thousands, but instead was in the thousands because you were one zero short.

There was an instance where you misidentified the city where this took place, mistakenly using the city of another assignment. (And that's not a gotcha; in journalism quite often you will be working on multiple stories at once, and will have to keep your facts in the right places.)

Finally, there was one situation where you identified the surgeon general as being from East Lansing. He was from the U.S. Public Health Service, speaking in E.L.

Not good. But here's the good news; in most cases your stories were well-organized with good ledes and developed nut grafs and logical flows of information throughout the story bodies. You're getting the big picture stuff, and that's good.

Still, we need to make sure that we're doing all the small things right, too. Like fact-checking.

So, I'd like to throw this out to you. What are the strategies YOU use in properly vetting a story before you turn it in? What works for you? What techniques have you learned or discarded or modified or built upon?

Let's share some good ideas. If something works for you, it'll probably work for someone else, too.