Some papers ask, ‘Has our work been up to snuff?’

For almost 10 years, I drove a Toyota Camry. Every time I took my car to the dealer for service, I’d get a phone call a few days later asking if the repair work and service had been satisfactory and if I had any questions or complaints.

The dealer told me those calls were made to all customers, and I’ve often wondered why newspapers don’t do something similar. Why not contact the people who’ve been interviewed and written about -- not all of them, just a random selection -- and ask if the stories were satisfactory and if there were any complaints or questions?

Did the stories quote them accurately and in context? Were their names spelled right? Were the facts in the story correct? Were they related fairly?

Had editors at the New York Times asked such questions of any of several dozen people whose names appeared in Jayson Blair’s stories, they would have learned of his serial fabrication and plagiarism long before he so tainted the newspaper that it became the butt of jokes on late-night comedy shows and its top two editors were forced to resign.

But the question of asking the subjects and sources of our stories whether we’ve done our job properly was raised long before Blair (and his bosses) embarrassed what is still the country’s best newspaper, and consideration of this tool shouldn’t be tied to one man’s deceit or one institution’s arrogance.

It is, of course, arrogance -- more than anything else -- that keeps newspapers from asking these questions. Journalists think, “We get it right most of the time” -- and most do. But most don’t trust the subjects of their stories to understand or to be fair-minded about the mistakes they do make.

Fortunately, not every editor feels that way.

A few papers -- the Seattle Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Buffalo News, St. Paul Pioneer Press and Fayetteville, N.C., Observer, among others -- send letters to the subjects of several stories every week, asking for a brief evaluation of their performance.

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‘Not a witch hunt’

“Every newspaper needs readers who hold us to a high standard and call us on it when we fall short,” Charles Broadwell, editor and publisher of the Fayetteville Observer, wrote in a column early this month. In that column, he urged those who had been covered in the paper to complete and submit the “accuracy and fairness checklists” that the paper has been sending out, with stamped, self-addressed envelopes, since last fall.

“We send out a dozen or two a week,” he told me, “and we send a copy of the relevant story with each one.”

The one-page questionnaire asks about the accuracy of spelling, ages, titles, organizations and headlines, and also asks if “all the essential information” was included and whether the article presented “a factual and unbiased report of events.”

Broadwell says there was “some trepidation on the staff when we started it, but we talked about it in a meeting and made clear that this is not a witch hunt. It’s part of an effort we started early last year to improve our accuracy and credibility, to track corrections more stringently and make our staff more aware of errors and corrections.”

Checklists that come back with positive comments are posted on the newsroom bulletin board, Broadwell says. Negative comments are “shared only with the appropriate reporters and editors.”

At least 85% of the comments in the letters have been favorable, Broadwell says, and that echoes the experience of a half-dozen other editors I’ve spoken with who have similar programs.

“When I was at the Miami Herald, in the ‘90s, we sent out letters, and the great majority came back saying, in effect, ‘You were right on the money,’ ” says Doug Clifton, now editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Sometimes people said we’d given them a bad shake, and every so often we’d uncover an error that we’d made that no one complained about. But we have such an enormous opportunity to get things wrong, and we correct only a tiny percentage of the mistakes we commit every day. I found that people welcomed being asked about our accuracy and fairness and balance.”

Now Clifton has started a similar program in Cleveland. Last week, he sent out the first of 10 letters a day that will ask those questions of people who’ve been written about in the Plan Dealer.

“We decided to do this before Jayson Blair,” Clifton says, “as a part of an ongoing effort to improve our accuracy.”

As at other papers that do this, the Plain Dealer letters will be sent to a random selection of people written about in various sections of the paper. It will include eight specific questions on accuracy, fairness, context and comprehensiveness, and will end with a more general “Is there anything else we should know about the accuracy, fairness and balance of the story?”

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Detailed form letters

Some newspapers have experimented with such letters periodically for years. Margaret Sullivan, editor of the Buffalo News, says the News first sent letters out “at least a decade ago, and it kind of goes up and down. We sent out 12 or 15 in January and 10 more last month.”

Mike Fancher, executive editor of the Seattle Times, started sending letters to the people his reporters wrote about back in the mid-1970s but discontinued it after 10 or 15 years when he found that “no one on the staff seemed to be taking responsibility for the errors that were found.”

The paper’s “committee on credibility” recently suggested a resumption of the letters, and they began going out again last week. The new form letters, which will also be available online and via e-mail, are the most detailed of any I’ve come across. Each is three pages long and contains 17 questions, about half of which are multiple choice, asking respondents to rank the accuracy, fairness, clarity and tone of the stories on a scale of one to five.

“We want to reinforce the notion that we realize some independent scrutiny of the work we do is good,” Fancher says.

John Carroll, editor of the Los Angeles Times, says he sent out such “accuracy and fairness” letters when he was editor of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader and “didn’t feel it was particularly useful.”

“I have no objection to it in principle,” Carroll said, “but it’s just not one of the arrows in our quiver right now.”

Steve Brill thinks these letters can be an important tool, especially in a time of declining public confidence in the news media. He’s appalled that so few editors have even tried it.

“I’ve suggested this kind of quality control to editors for years, and the silence with which that suggestion is greeted is always deafening,” Brill says.

Brill, an author and Newsweek columnist, is the former editor of the American Lawyer and Brill’s Content, a journalism review of sorts. He says that when he first began sending such letters at the American Lawyer, staff members complained that it would “lower morale” and that the letters would suggest “we didn’t have confidence in the integrity of the staff.”

But he too found that the vast majority of responses to the letters he sent were positive, and after he sent a number of them to staff members, saying, in effect, “Look at the great things this person said about your article,” resistance was replaced by pride.

“We did catch four or five bad journalists with these letters, and just having that system in place serves as a deterrent to many others,” he says.

Equally important, every letter served as a statement of what the paper stood for and of how vigorously it wanted to enforce its standards.

That’s a good message for the news media to send to an increasingly skeptical citizenry.

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David Shaw can be reached a david.shaw@latimes.com.