CCJ Traveling Curriculum [1] trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson [2] is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the aauthor of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression [3] and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression [4]. She blogs regularly here [5].

 Who among us can say we have never made a mistake? I’m not talking about misspelling a name, and I’m not talking about the epic disasters—the Jayson Blairs or Janet Cookes. I’m talking about misconceived ideas, great stories we missed, interviewees who suffered at our hands, colleagues whose insights we ignored...the ways to screw up in journalism are endless.

So why am I bringing this up? Because our mistakes teach us more than our triumphs, if we’re willing to learn. And though it’s painful to revisit the past in this way, I’ve been out of the newsroom long enough to develop some scar tissue. So, in the interests of generating some thought out there in newsroom-land, I hereby present my Parade of Horribles.

One of my earliest mistakes involved a story I wrote for the obscure weekly newspaper that gave me my first job. (If you’re going to screw up, that’s how to do it.) A parent at a school board meeting complained that his son was being shortchanged because the county schools had no sports equipment. I dutifully reported this statement. When the story ran I got a scorching phone call from the school board superintendent, who informed me that, in fact, the county had all kinds of sports equipment, and that the parent had grossly exaggerated the facts. If I’d troubled to ask, I would have known that.

“But I’m just reporting what happened at the meeting,” I said defensively, but even as I said it I knew it sounded lame. I should have checked. I didn’t.

Sounds like a beginner’s mistake, right? If so, there are a lot of seasoned pros making it these days. This specific error—repeating assertions without any attempt to verify or challenge them—lay at the heart of most of the media coverage of the lead-up to the war in Iraq. As Byron Calame, the New York Times’ current ombudsman wrote last February, during the year prior to the beginning of the war in Iraq, “the Times prominently reported that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Deeply shamed when they were not found, the paper publicly acknowledged that its coverage had been ‘insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.” The Times was far from alone; the list of offenders is too long to enumerate. My rookie error was a fortunate thing indeed, because it engraved a fundamental tenet of journalistic inquiry on my brain. As the old saying goes, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

Flash forward a few years, to my next job and a story involving a trial in federal court. Some of the testimony concerned a criminal defense lawyer who I knew, who harbored a healthy hatred of the news media. It’s not unusual for criminal defense lawyers to be accused of playing fast and loose with the law (after all, they spend a lot of time with criminals) and that was the gist of the testimony about this lawyer. So when it came time to sum up the testimony, I wrote that witnesses had testified that Mr. So-and-So was “probably corrupt.” A faint warning bell went off in my head. I reviewed the testimony. Nope, the things they were saying at him weren’t nice, not at all. I let the story go to the desk.

Next thing I know, Mr. So-and-So himself is in the newsroom, hand-delivering a demand for a retraction. His complaint: by using the word “corrupt” I had accused him of “taking bribes.” What?? I went to the dictionary, which told me that the word “corrupt” indeed had the meaning I had intended—“lacking in integrity”—but that definition came after the first, which was “guilty of dishonest practices, specifically bribery.” I went to another dictionary; there was “bribery” again. A third dictionary, and “bribery” was once more prominently mentioned. If I looked, I could find a couple of definitions which did not specifically mention “bribery” right off the bat, but I had to look pretty hard. My editors, deciding they had better things to do than litigate, ran a retraction on the front page the next day. I kept a voodoo doll with Mr. So-and-So’s name on it in my desk drawer for the next year or so, along with a lot of straight pins. But the next time I wrote a story involving anybody who didn’t like reporters—heck, any story involving a lawyer—I didn’t just double check, I triple checked. That experience also cured me of the belief that being a good writer meant “doesn’t need a dictionary.”

The other two mistakes were more subtle. I bring them up because they illustrate the value of plain old life experience—either your own or somebody else’s.

The first involved the 1990 Marion Barry cocaine possession trial. I covered it for the Washington Post, and there wasn’t a single factual error in all of the many stories I wrote that summer. The error lay in what I didn’t say. There were nuances to that case, layers of meaning in certain parts of testimony, that I missed. I was new to Washington at the time, and I didn’t understand the depth of the resentment in the black community about the lengths to which the government had gone to in order to make the case. I also didn’t understand the reasons Barry commanded such loyalty among so many people; I didn’t understand the extent to which those people had been ignored and shafted by other elected officials over the years. There were so many ways my stories could have been better if I had fully comprehended the context.

Okay, you say, but you were new to Washington—what did you expect, psychic powers? No, but I did have a colleague, Jill Nelson, who had been given a kind of bench-warmer role in our coverage, who had a far better grasp of those issues than I did. I could have talked to her, but I didn’t. I had my reasons at the time—newsroom politics at the Post were prickly, to say the least—but now that I look back on it, none of those reasons look good enough to me.

The other involved a young drug dealer I wrote a long feature about. A high school dropout whose father was in jail, he told me with cocky assurance that his plan in life was to go into the family business, which was selling drugs. It was that brash assertion that got my attention, along with his charisma and obvious smarts. I noticed a couple of times that Pablo would say, “Akuna mattata,” and I passed it off as some piece of street slang. If I’d been a mom then, I probably would have seen “The Lion King”—the movie that phrase comes from—and I would have realized that the impression it had made on him was a clue to something important. Like Simba the Lion King, Pablo saw himself as the rightful heir to his father’s role, which in this case was being the city’s biggest drug dealer. To Pablo, selling cocaine was morally indistinguishable from selling cigarettes (and that’s a point of view I’m still thinking about). What I had then, wasn’t a story about juvenile delinquency; it was a story about a son who idolized his father, one which just happened to involve illegal drugs. I wrote that story in a one-dimensional way—one more true-crime tale of a young street thug—when it could have been much more.

I wish I could go back and do it over, but it’s too late. For you, though, maybe it isn’t.

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