Missing: We Had Some Fatals

Four, to be exact. Let's look at them not to make anybody feel bad, but so we can all learn from these mistakes and develop good editing habits to minimize repeat happenings.

First, make sure you understand the information you have. This lede did not:

57,152 East Lansing residents played hide and seek last year and the players weren’t just children.

It was a cute lede with nice word play. The problem is, the information you had wasn't that almost 60,000 city residents went missing. It was that many people went missing throughout the state. And that's a fatal.

When I say to mke sure you understand what you are writing, I don't mean to question whether you understand basic English. What I mean is, do you understand the content and context of your story and are you reporting the information in a way that is true to the facts? I suspect that maybe you read through your information a bit too quickly and missed that signifiant nuance of what geographic area was represented by the data.

Next, be sure to check basic data sets, like statistics.

One of you reported 483,384 people missing people were found in Michigan. In fact, it was 48,384.

You had two ways to catch this: first, if you did a thorough post-writing fact-by-fact check of your story, you would have discovered that you added a digit onto this specific number, creating a fatal.

Second, if you did an adequate reading of your story before you sent it over, you would have noticed a factual impossibility. This was your lede:

According to the U.S. Justice Department, 57,152 people in Michigan were reported missing last year. Out of that number, 483,384 were found, while 9,000 are still missing.

It's a decently-structured lede, but let's read it carefully: it offers a mathematical impossibility. It says out of around 57,000 people, that almost 500,000 were found.

Again, a careful read would have allowed you to notice that you were saying something that wasn't possible. It would have tipped you off to the fact that there was a fatal somewhere in that graf.

Also, be sure to check other basic data sets, like names. Make sure they are spelled correctly.

One of you spelled the last name of Jason Abare two ways: as Abare and Albare. An adequate line-by-line and fact-by-fact review of your story after finishing writing would have revealed that you were spelling it two different ways, and one way had to be wrong.

That fatal -- contained in the last sentence of the story -- was a shame, because otherwise the story was superb in structure and style. Still, you get no break for where an error goes. It can start a story or end a story, and it's just as bad.

Another one of you spelled the name of Manuel Cortez as Manuel Cortex. Not only is that a fatal, it's a fatal that spell check won't catch, since cortex is spelled correctly for the word cortex. The cortex is the outer layer of an organ or part, as of the kidney and cerebellum, for example. That's what it says in the dictionary on my desk, at least.

And that leads me to my next blog entry ...