The Toronto Star published 1,179 corrections in 2017 — 819 online and 360 in print, the newspaper’s public editor, Kathy English, reported. Many involved the basics — “mistakes about geography and history to science and math,” she wrote, flagging errors like naming the wrong person, or the wrong gender for part of a flower, or misspelling locations and items.
In her annual column looking back at the Star‘s errors, English provided examples of noteworthy errors, such as misspelling Canada as Canda and confusing Prince William and Prince Harry in a photo caption.
“To be honest, I believe the number of online corrections is likely higher, however,” English explained. “A large amount of digital content is published and corrected around the clock in real time and I know that deadline pressures mean that these online errors and fixes don’t always get reported to the public editor’s office to be captured in our corrections spreadsheet, as is required.”
In 2016, the Star published 1,049 corrections, English reported. In 2015, the Globe and Mail published 870 total corrections.
English’s counterpart at the Globe and Mail, public editor Sylvia Stead, reported that the newspaper made “about 40 to 50 errors month.” In 2016, the Globe published about 450 corrections.
To illustrate the type of common errors the Globe made in 2017, Stead provided a “small quiz” of “17 fact-related things” the newspaper got wrong.
Examples included where Banff, Canada is located, the gender of K.T. McFarland, the population of Qatar, the name of Pres. Donald Trump’s wife, and where Jerry Sandusky used to coach. Take the full quiz on the Globe‘s website.