WHEN DAVID Mata submitted his letter to the editor, he realized he'd gotten a fact wrong. Three minutes later, he submitted a correction.
The error appeared in The Cavalier Daily anyway.
Mata's letter ("The price is wrong," Thursday) said Al Groh had been ranked the worst coach in college football by ESPN before this season began. But according to Mata's e-mail to me Friday, that ranking was actually by "the Sports Illustrated website."
Even that may be an overstatement. The ranking was the work of one SI.com columnist, Stewart Mandel, who has since told The Richmond Times-Dispatch that his bottom five coaches appeared in "pretty arbitrary" order and that Groh was "the one who's most proven it wrong." So to say that he was ranked at the bottom by "the Sports Illustrated website" is an exaggeration. It sounds like an institutional effort, perhaps even one involving a formula and quantifiable facts; what there was was one guy tossing out a few opinions.
So how did the error get into the paper?
First, Mata submitted his letter, using The Cavalier Daily's online form for letters to the editor, without first double-checking it. He had noticed the error before becoming distracted, he said in his e-mail, and when he returned to the letter he did not thoroughly review it before pressing submit. He caught the error soon thereafter, to his credit, but that proved insufficient to stop the error from appearing in the paper over his name. Moral: Double-check letters carefully before submitting them.
Second, when Mata submitted his correction, he included a revised version of the letter. But the online form sends letters to the editor in chief, who in turn forwards most of them to the opinion editors. And the editor in chief, Herb Ladley, uses GMail. GMail combined the two messages Mata sent via the form -- the letter including the mistake and the revised version with the note about the correction -- into one thread or "conversation." Ladley then forwarded, not just one e-mail, but the whole e-mail conversation to the Opinion section. Opinion editor Daniel Colbert only noticed one letter -- the erroneous one -- in the forward from Ladley, and that was what he put into the editing system. Then Ladley, when he saw the letter again before it was published, did not notice that the error was still in Mata's letter. Moral: Just as we've all had to learn when to use CC and when BCC, and when to use reply and when reply-all, so now everyone who uses an e-mail system that provides both options should be conscious of the difference between forwarding one message and forwarding a conversation. Second moral, also relevant beyond the opinion section: Look more carefully at forwarded messages you receive. If Ladley had forwarded only the corrected letter, or if Colbert had noticed that there were two versions, the error could have been kept out of the paper.
Third, no one at The Cavalier Daily tried to verify that Groh had received the low ranking from ESPN. "We read letters, not usually for content, but for style and grammar," Colbert said. Letters do not go to copy editors, who check certain facts in sections of the newspaper other than Opinion.
It is reasonable to let letter writers take full responsibility for making sure their facts are correct. Indeed, some very important facts in any section will always be the sole responsibility of the writer: If a reporter or columnist tracks someone down for an interview, quite commonly only the writer and the source know what was said in the interview; if a writer notes his own observation, it may be that no one else made the same observation. Factual claims have to be based on someone's perceptions.
And letter writers speak only for themselves, not for the newspaper, which they often criticize. Indeed, one purpose of letters to the editor is to contradict the newspaper's view; when facts are in dispute, it makes some sense to publish even letters making factual claims the editors think are wrong. This way, the readers can judge.
But this means letter writers, if they are concerned -- as honor demands -- with the truth of what goes out over their names, have to be very careful to get the facts right. And they need to be careful to get the facts right before they submit their work, not after. "Once you submit it for publication ... it's in our system," Ladley said. That applies to opinions writers are uncomfortable with, too: "You can't just call and take things back."
Yet it is disappointing that the paper allowed an error Mata had already caught to appear in print. This might have been avoided had he had the opportunity to look at his letter before it was printed. A policy of letting letter writers see the final versions of their contributions would be even more helpful in cases where the editors have had to cut the letters down to size.
I asked Dan Keyserling, the executive editor, who supervises the opinion section, whether this would be possible. He said letters are normally finished being edited at approximately 10 p.m., and it would be feasible to give their writers till midnight to look at them. This should be done. While there are time constraints, it would not take long to e-mail the columns to the writers, nor, if they have submitted their phone numbers, as they are theoretically required to do, to call them and ask them to check their e-mail.
One important reason letters get as little editing as they do is to ensure that they reflect their writers' opinions, not the editors'. It's worth a bit of extra work to make sure the letters say what their writers really want them to say.
Alexander R. Cohen is The Cavalier Daily's ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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