My Billings Gazette

I'll use a bit of good news today for reflection and motivation.

It seems that this blog (and, specifically, its previous incarnation) has been recognized by the Pacific Northwest chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. It received third place in the specialty-blog category.

That's great, as far it goes. But the blog has been sluggish of late, for a lot of reasons, and many of them center on me. So consider this my first step in kicking it back up a notch.

I can think of no better way to do this than turning to our friend John McIntyre, who has been busy with his new blog since his departure from the Baltimore Sun.

This entry from a few days ago, on the tendency toward error, is typically first-rate.

A sampling:

We are overly reliant on our perceptions, which are partial, and our memories, which reconstruct rather than record. This is why eyewitness testimony in trials so regularly contributes to the conviction of innocent people.

And, copy editors should take particular note here, we defer too much to experts, who are in turn overconfident in their expertise. The medical industry, in an effort to reduce anesthesiologists’ errors in the operating room, has taken a number of measures, among them “attitude adjustment.” Pay close attention: “They began discouraging the idea of doctor as know-it-all, and encouraged nurses and others to speak up if they saw someone—especially the anesthesiologist—do something wrong. In error-speak, this is known as ‘flattening the authority gradient,’ and it has been shown as an effective way to reduce errors.”