Well done to the Adfero Editorial teams.

This is a big thank you to all correspondents, lead correspondent, desk heads, sub editors, editors and everyone else involved in writing articles for our customers. For the third month running our “negative editorial actions” i.e. errors, are down.

They have reduced the percentage of errors from 0.645% of articles containing an error in July to 0.632% of articles containing an error in August. In real terms this means one error in every 158 articles, which is a great achievement.

Editorial quality is obviously key to any news agency and of course no one gets it perfect. How many of you see errors in the Metro on a daily basis? Or the BBC website, especially over the weekend? There is no industry standard for this and no agency ever seems to want to stick their head above the parapet and say we have ‘x’ or ’y’ error rate.
For example this article posted on the BBC I came across this morning about the London paper closing http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8262303.stm. Im sure it should read “News International” not “New International” as published. I love the BBC but it is still run by humans.


So without this we can only go by our “rule of thumb” and I would be interested to see how many of you reading this truly believe they could read 158 articles on the BBC website, Metro, or just about any other publication without noticing an error?!

For the cynical people out there reading this blog and probably quite rightly pointing out a huge array of errors in it (it’s a good job I don’t work in our editorial department!), then I refer you back to the opening article and disclaimer in it. So to finish with one of my favourite quotes from Mark Twain “I despise a man who can only spell a word one way”.