Every year, newspapers make blatant, embarrassing, egregious errors, and every year, Craig Silverman is there to catch them. In the latest edition of the Year in Media Errors and Corrections, Silverman collects plenty of gaffes, including the headline from the DeKalb News (left), some of which are hilarious and some just sad. Here are a few favorites:

From The Justice (Brandeis University):
The original article provided the incorrect location of New York University’s new institution. It is in Abu Dhabi, not Abu Ghraib.

From The Guardian (U.K.):
This article was amended on Tuesday 20 January 2009. In our entry on Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, we referred to a Prairie Ho Companion; we meant a Prairie Home Companion. This has been corrected.

From the Los Angeles Times:
Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.

And the correction of the year, from the Washington Post:
A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

Source:  Regret the Error  

The new Star Trek has unleashed a slew of inaccuracies about the franchise in newspapers across the country, and detail-oriented devotees aren’t letting them get away with it. Craig Silverman, editor of the fantastic newspaper-correction-spotter RegretTheError.com, tracks a series of Star Trek–related flubs—and subsequent corrections issued by editors bombarded with letters from Trekkies—in his most recent column for the Columbia Journalism Review:

The superfans deserve credit for being so diligent and outspoken. They seek out mistakes contained in the far reaches of every newspaper and set their emails to stun. And they’re on the hunt at all times…

Source: Columbia Journalism Review

Image by alfredituzz :B, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Everyone makes mistakes, and journalists are no different. Some, however, go beyond the occasional typo and into the truly astounding. The website Regret the Error compiles all the best corrections from journalistic organizations, and every year gives awards for the most notable screw-ups. Among the 2008 winners was this gem from Reuters:

Celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson has apologized after accidentally recommending a potentially deadly plant in organic salads.

Another outstanding contender was this unfortunate mistake from the New York Times:

A picture last Sunday with an essay about a crack house in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, was published in error. The three houses in the picture are on the same street as the crack house, but none of the three figured in the essay.

How embarrassing.

The newspaper corrections page serves as a pointed reminder that those tree-killing bastions of traditional media do occasionally get things wrong. Regret the Error, a website dedicated to following the media’s mistakes, has cobbled together an amusing roundup of some of the best—or worst—errors of the year. Here’s what the site deemed Correction of the Year, from the UK’s Independent Saturday magazine:

Following the portrait of Tony and Cherie Blair published on 21 April in the Independent Saturday magazine, Ms Blair’s representatives have told us that she was friendly with but never had a relationship with Carole Caplin of the type suggested in the article. They want to make it clear, which we are happy to do, that Ms Blair “has never shared a shower with Ms Caplin, was not introduced to spirit guides or primal wrestling by Ms Caplin (or anyone else), and did not have her diary masterminded by Ms Caplin.”

Yowza! More of the gems include typos (the New York Times referred to Pakistan’s capital as Islambad rather than Islamabad), photos with dodgy captions (the Miami Herald identified the president of the Dominican Republic as a drug smuggler), and a clarification from Slate regarding how many lines of cocaine make up an eight ball.

—Brendan Mackie