So does that mean more than two thirds of Haitians drink goats’ blood while practicing voodoo? Or they do it just for fun and not out of a religious inclination? Or no goats’ blood at all?

One regular awardee in my year-end post is Slate. That site somehow always manages to come up with corrections that present very strange information in a hilarious, matter-of-fact manner. From this year’s round-up:

In a May 21 ”Slatest” item, Jessica Loudis mistakenly cited a New Scientist article as saying that male bats that performed fellatio on each other before copulation. The article stated that female bats perform fellatio on male bats during copulation.

This one earned the award for Most Puzzling Correction:

In the April 29 “Culturebox,” Jonah Weiner originally stated that Moses was rendered as a giant glowing dreidel. Moses was depicted as the Master Control Program from the film Tron. Who sort of looks like a giant glowing dreidel.

Reuters also deserves recognition for its continued presence in the year-end post. This year it earned a mention in the typo category for referring to the Large Hadron Collider as the “Large Hardon Collider.” (I know, I’m a child.)

Last year it was recognized for this rather amazing fortune-telling lead:






The news service is also a former two-time champ (2005 and 2006) in the highly competitive Typo of the Year category for favorites such as reporting about the recall of “beef panties” and some amazing reporting about Queen Elizabeth.

Its reign in that category ended in 2007, when it was forced to settle for runner-up status with a typo that referred to the Muttahida Quami Movement the “Muttonhead Quail Movement.”

Which brings me to this year’s top typo. It was the now-famous TBD.com error that led to this correction (and a column from me):

This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men.

TBD.com is barely a few months old and it’s already managed to make an impact. No, this annual rite isn’t going to get any easier for me…

Correction of the Week

“Owing to an editing error, we said that Simply Red singer Mick Hucknall slept with more than 1,000 women in a three-year period during the mid-80s. That was meant to be more than 1,000 a year, based on his estimate of an average of three such encounters a day, as stated elsewhere in our stories (A new flame: Hucknall apology to 1,000 women he bedded, page 19, 3 December; ‘I feel a bit like the antichrist’, page 3, Film & Music).” - The Guardian

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Craig Silverman is the editor of RegretTheError.com and the author of Regret The Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech. He is also the editorial director of OpenFile.ca and a columnist for the Toronto Star.