To Err is Human...

Photo by George Becker

I screwed up.

Maybe you noticed, maybe not. But a few errors slipped through in a couple of my recently published interviews.

Running a publication like this—one in which I’m responsible for the words of another person—can be stressful. I never want to let my interview subjects (and in turn, their publicists) down, so I go through a long, laborious process every time I write up a Q&A: The audio is uploaded to a site and transcribed. I listen to the recording while reading the transcription, fixing errors as I go. I download the transcript and clean up the interview—removing ums, ahs, half sentences, and such, while also cutting it down to an appropriate length.

I write the lede and then proofread the piece, running it through Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar check and then reading and rereading the entire thing multiple times. I have Word’s “read aloud” function read it back to me. I Google every name and every title to make sure nothing is misspelled.

Then …