By Michael Getler

Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page B06

Correction: In last Sunday's column, I misstated the location of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It is in Northwest Washington.

That correction would usually appear at the bottom of today's column. But I'm going to take advantage of my own mistake and use it as a way to write about The Post's policy on corrections and why it occasionally frustrates readers.

The Post, in general, is a well-edited newspaper. But it publishes, on a typical day, about 150,000 words plus dozens of graphs, charts and photo captions. So mistakes are certain to happen. The mistakes I'm talking about are factual errors, like the one I made last week. There are also occasional errors in spelling, grammar and usage, as well as typographical errors. These may happen too often for close readers. But they are facts of life for a big daily newspaper, and they don't get officially corrected, although they do get pointed out to reporters and editors when they are caught.

The main corrections box is on Page A2 every day, although the editorial page and Book World run corrections on their own pages, and other special sections such as Home and Food may run corrections in their sections to make sure their readers see them. The Post published 933 corrections in 2001, 1,066 in 2002 and more than 330 so far this year.

The Post has internal policy guidelines on corrections that state, in part: "This newspaper is pledged to minimize the number of errors we make and to correct those that occur. Accuracy is our goal; candor is our defense. Persons who call errors to our attention must be accorded a respectful hearing."

The intentions are good, but the reality is somewhat different. I have just told you more about corrections than The Post ever tells you. Unlike the box that sometimes runs at the bottom of the editorial page that tells you how to submit a letter to the editor, the A2 corrections box tells you nothing about how to submit corrections and provides no policy statement. The result is that corrections are too haphazard an enterprise, and undoubtedly some items that meet the test of a factual error requiring a correction don't get fixed. Because there is no central repository for reader-suggested corrections, one reader says, "the implication is that corrections are made only by alert Post staffers reading their own or others' copy." Readers also routinely note that the Saturday Free for All page invariably has readers pointing out mistakes that otherwise go uncorrected.

In the absence of a central address or phone number, demands for corrections arrive in many different ways, and some fall by the wayside. Maybe a reporter gets a call but doesn't tell his or her editor. Maybe an editor gets a call and forgets about it, or thinks it's too small a point to correct. I get a lot of calls and forward them to various editors and reporters, but what happens after that is, properly, up to editors. A lot of people send e-mails and write letters to individual reporters and editors, and those, too, can get put aside within departments by people busy putting out the next day's paper.

"Errors that need correction may go uncorrected simply because we don't offer readers a consistent, easy vehicle for pointing out mistakes," says Vince Rinehart, the chief of the National staff's copy desk and the person who ultimately vets all the A2 corrections for clarity, accuracy and fairness before they go into the paper. "We also ought to state [in the paper] what our general correction policy is," he says. The responsibility for listening to complaints, checking them out, deciding on the need for corrections and determining their basic wording and urgency rests with the editors in individual departments, Rinehart says. But what the process frequently depends on, he points out, "is the willingness of reporters and editors to pass along feedback. Some are very accepting, others are less so, or dismissive."

Rinehart is a top-notch editor, dedicated to keeping faith with readers on correcting errors. The Post, as an institution, is also dedicated to that proposition. But the process doesn't quite match the intentions.

Michael Getler can be reached by phone at (202) 334-7582 or by e-mail at ombudsman@washpost.com.