We got it wrong and we're sorry

We made a mistake Wednesday night. In fact, it was one of the biggest mistakes a newspaper can make.\nIn a story about a student who was arrested and hospitalized after an incident with a fraternity and a police squad car, we got the student's name wrong.\nIt wasn't spelled incorrectly. It was wrong.\nWhen faced with a mistake of this magnitude, there are really only three things a newspaper can do: come clean, apologize and take steps to prevent future errors of the type.\nFirst, we ran a correction Friday on the same page where the error ran Thursday. We also corrected the information online.\nSecond, we're sorry. As editor of the Indiana Daily Student, I am sorry. This was a terrible mistake and an injustice to the readers of this newspaper. Our readers should be able to expect that the information they get from the IDS is correct. That we made such a big error violates that trust.\nThird, we are doing everything we can to make sure this doesn't happen again. \nThe circumstances that allowed an error like this to slip by three rounds of editing represented a perfect storm of oversight. \nThe mistake began as nearly every mistake does -- with the reporters who wrote the story. They wrote the wrong name into their story. \nHowever, Bloomington Police Department, as a matter of policy, does not hand out police reports -- the source of most of the information in stories like that one. Instead, an officer read the information in the report to the reporters. If our reporters and editors had a police report to fact-check, we might have caught the mistake. \nTo remedy this, we have made sure that all editors make reporters double-check the names in police stories against their names, not just against the police reports. We are also looking at other, more sweeping policy changes to help prevent further mix-ups. \nIn addition, we are planning police reporting and editing workshops with our staff to ensure we all learn from this mistake and hope it will never happen again.