DCentric

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In today’s morning roundup, I included an item about TBD’s Amanda Hess issuing an unintentionally humorous correction to one of her columns:

This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men.

My Twitter stream contained dozens of references to it, so I’m not surprised that today, TBD called it “The correction heard ’round the world“:

Now that you’ve had your laugh, I hope you’ll also note the commitment to accuracy that this demonstrates.

We explained in a blog post before TBD.com ever launched that “we will be as aggressive in correcting our mistakes as we were in making them. Each article or blog item that includes a mistake will carry highly visible correction… The corrections policy will apply to all errors of fact as well as misspellings of proper nouns and the like. Errors than can be classified as typos will get a pass.”

Knowing it would bring some mild embarrassment and also awaken the Internet trolls, Hess could have chalked up the missing “n” as a typo, quietly changed it and moved on. But Hess wrote the correction anyway.

We make it easy for you to tell us about needed corrections and we are committed to always correct mistakes, whether they are big, important ones or small but embarrassing ones.

I’m highlighting this because it’s admirable…and because this part of the story deserves just as much attention as the typo (if not more).