Paul Lewis: Reading and weeping

This week's correction - we managed to spell Spurs' home ground White Heart Lane instead of White Hart Lane - calls to mind the whole wonderful gamut of newspaper errors and corrections.

There is only one thing certain in journalism: everyone will make at least one horrendous cock-up in his or her career.

Mine - or the one I remember best - was as a bewildered cub reporter on the Royal New Zealand Herald; given the unpleasant task of shipping reporter's apprentice.

Unable to be trusted with anything of significance, I was assigned to the shipping movements table - a simple collection of those ships in port; ships leaving and those about to berth.

Shipping companies, stevedores and exporters viewed these tables keenly and based much of their business around them - as I discovered when I monumentally stuffed them up.

I had ships in port that were not here. I had ships leaving that had never arrived. I had ships arriving that were still making their way round the Cape of Good Hope.

A tsunami of complaints arrived. As the person responsible, I quite rightly had to answer the telephone which rang with terrifying regularity.

Each caller produced a fresh load of expletives and questioned my sanity. At the end of the day, flushed and flustered, I was close to tears.

"What's the matter, mate?" inquired an Australian reporter who noticed my distress. I told him of my sin. "Ah, you don't want to worry about that," he said.

With that, the phone rang. He saw me cringe. He picked it up and quickly removed it from his ear. The whole newsroom could hear the caller shouting down the phone. He wasn't using pleasant words.

My colleague interrupted the vicious flow: "Hey ... hey ... hey," he yelled, until the man on the other end quietened. "Do you know who you are speaking to?" my colleague bellowed.

When the answer came in the negative, he said: "Good, well, f*** off, then" and hung up.

Since then I have taken a probably unhealthy interest in newspaper errors.

An old favourite comes from the Times of London in the 1950s. 'Nizam of Hyderabad Dead', said the headline. Two days later, came the intriguing follow up: 'Nizam of Hyderabad Slightly Better'.

Most corrections are best employed quickly, accurately and with full confession and transparency. But there are some extenuating circumstances and there are some clever corrections which deserve the accolade of 'bravo'.

There was the classic from the Aberdeen Press & Journal which said: "We have been asked to point out that Stuart Kennedy, of Flat E, 38 Don Street, Aberdeen, who appeared at Peterhead Sheriff Court on Monday, had 316 pink, frilly garters confiscated not 316 pink, frilly knickers."

Or the Times again: "We may owe an apology to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Last month we dubbed it 'Whitehall's answer to Sir Elton John' after it emerged that it had spent £46,000 on pot plants in two years. Now we learn that staff at the Department for Children, Schools and Families spent £78,000 on pot plants in a single year. The crown, thus, is theirs."

But probably the king of corrections was/is the Guardian, for many years celebrated as the Grauniad in Private Eye's satirical view of the errors which used to litter its pages.

"We said that, in the American TV drama 24, Jack Bauer, the counter-terrorism agent, resorted to electrocution to extract information. You cannot extract information from someone who has been electrocuted because they are dead."

And: "Some confusion arose in a review of a television drama about knife crime as a result of mishearing the term shanking, which means stabbing someone with a knife, as shagging."

Some choose to shift the blame, like the New York Post recently: "The source who told us last week about Michelle Obama getting lobster and caviar delivered to her room at the Waldorf-Astoria must have been under the influence of a mind-altering drug. She was not even staying at the Waldorf. We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too."

Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, the former mayor of Auckland once threatened to sue the New Zealand Herald when a story about his liking for the ladies was unfortunately and confusingly laid next to an ad for a champion stud bull. An apology was issued.

But the best and most excoriating correction of all time, I believe, was that of Gawker, an online media company and blog specialist with some hard-hitting views.

After it repeatedly got it wrong that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, one of the sons of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, had paid Beyonce to perform at a New Year's party, Gawker was told by Gaddafi's PR agent that it wasn't true.

What followed must have had the PR flack choking on his morning coffee.

Gawker started with a headline: 'Correction: Beyonce Played NYE Show for Different Shithead Gaddafi Son'.

It continued: "Tonight we received an urgent email from the PR firm representing shithead Libyan Dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam: We incorrectly reported Beyonce performed for him this New Year's! She actually performed for Col. Gaddafi's other shithead son, Hannibal.

"Col. Gadaffi is in fact a ranting, terrorist-backing shithead of truly staggering proportions. It is as if God literally took a pile of shit, fashioned it into the shape of a head, placed it gingerly on the neck of Muammar al-Gaddafi, then let him run a good-sized country using only the worm-addled brain contained therein. Not a 'perception': A cold, hard, metaphorical fact."

Oh dear. And why am I telling you all this? Because, in last week's issue of the Herald on Sunday, we called the Black Caps a cricket team. They are anything but right now. Apologies.