«As an affectionate reader, I would like to point out that today’s front page headline” Kiev’s Revenge on Mary the Rebel “reports, in my opinion, an error. Maria Kolesnikova was tried by a Belarusian court (whose capital is Minsk). Kiev (capital of Ukraine) has no connection in the context of the article by Giuseppe Agliastro on page 14. The only reference to Ukraine is the moment when Kolesnikova herself is forced against her will to leave Belarusian territory at the Ukrainian border. I believe that this would not change the meaning of the title which perhaps meant to summarize the story with “The revenge of Minsk” and not of Kiev. With esteem ”(letter signed by Alessandro Gatta di Forlì). The letter from Costante Marengo is more succinct: «In La Stampa today, 7 September ’21, by mistake you wrote” The revenge of Kiev “… instead of” The revenge of Minsk “!».
The readers are right, we were wrong (pdf here). It was obviously Minsk not Kiev. The mistake was only in the front page headline in the paper newspaper and not on the page with the article, it didn’t go out online. But the pdf remains in the archive. So, if only to let those who have seen it know that we are aware of it, we correct ourselves and apologize here. There are many journalists who fear that doing so will end up reporting errors even to readers who have not seen them, but throwing the dust under the carpet is not an acceptable solution. According to all media experts, if it is true that errors are negative, it is also true that corrections are good, and if they are transparent they are even better. In the case of a newspaper, they communicate that it shows itself responsible, that it wants to be a reliable point of reference, as impeccable as possible, and that to be so it must manage errors, not ignore them.
We wrote about it four years ago when hundreds of employees of the New York Times they staged a street protest in front of their newspaper’s headquarters against job cuts for proofreaders, a job that has disappeared in newsrooms in financial difficulties, despite all media experts claiming that only quality will save newspapers. Having the guarantee of a “copy editor” who would review an article was a sort of safety net to avoid many mistakes, because making mistakes is human and when you work in a newspaper that does not have the times of an encyclopedia, it obviously happens.
Without correctors, errors have inevitably increased. When – for a thousand reasons, often a simple oversight in good faith – they are not caught and corrected before publication, it is up to you to correct them later. If it is a question of typos or other venial errors, it is corrected only in the online version, because the die is now cast for the paper. For the most serious errors, on the other hand, there is the instrument of “errata corrige”, a Latin phrase that originated not by chance immediately after the invention of printing. Usually its location was on the letter page. But that page has been gone for a year and a half, the readers’ letters have been moved online, where there is actually more space, with the consequence, however, that the errata has lost its space. With the consequence that it is published more and more rarely. And it hasn’t been replaced with an online corrections page, like the New York Times did. A pity, because the more corrections you see published in a newspaper, the better. This is confirmed by the American research institute Poynter, which has been studying the media for over 45 years: readers always appreciate errata, they consider it an index of quality.
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