Policy Corner: Owning our mistakes

We all make mistakes. We're human, after all.

In the news business, however, our mistakes are laid bare for all to see.

Mistakes can damage our credibility. It might make you wonder whether if we get something small wrong will we also get the big things wrong, too.

Mistakes are embarrassing to us.

But more than that, they could be embarrassing, disappointing or worse for the people we're writing about.

That's why we own our mistakes. We print corrections and, in some cases, clarifications, and put them on Page 4.

We try to avoid repeating the mistake, while providing clarity.

With stories on dailyherald.com, we can make corrections a lot faster. Immediately, in fact. We'll tell you when we make them - with an editor's note - and edit the story accordingly.

In the rarest of cases, when multiple corrections are needed, we will write a corrective story.

In our pursuit of breaking news, my edict is that it's more important to be right than to be first. We're sometimes criticized for publishing incomplete stories on dailyherald.com.

We post or print only what we can verify. And oftentimes getting some news out there now is more important than getting all of it out at once later.

We often update stories on the web several times in a day.

What's important to note is that our making a mistake is not tantamount to us publishing "fake news."

The purpose of "fake news" is to mislead. And we do not engage in that.

That is unforgivable.