• We regret that in our fiftieth anniversary special masthead, a list of everyone who’s ever worked here, we garbled Michael Massing, a CJR pillar for thirty-two years. First, we could have listed him with the Associate Editors, since he was an editor on staff from 1979 to 1983, and second, we should have got the years right for his substantial run as a Contributing Editor—1983 to the present.
• In our timeline, “Through the Years,” we incorrectly identified a Christian Science Monitor series on national parks as the first work on an ecological issue to win a Pulitzer. Roy Harris, author of Pulitzer’s Gold, suggests that distinction likely belongs to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation of high-sulfur coal’s contribution to the city’s smoke problem. That won in 1941, before there was a CJR.
• As Julia Preston notes in her charming letter on page 6, we got her newspaper affiliation wrong in a caption on page 54, in our Magnum photo gallery. She was working for The Boston Globe at the time, 1984, not The Washington Post.
• Last but hardly least, the face of Stanley Nelson that you saw in the lovely Lyndon Hayes drawing on page 87 in the anniversary issue is the face of a Stanley Nelson all right, but not our Stanley Nelson. The face that appeared in the magazine belongs to a respected documentary filmmaker whose work includes a number of PBS productions, including Freedom Riders, We Shall Remain, and The Murder of Emmett Till. Our Stanley Nelson, of course, is the editor of the Concordia Sentinel, a weekly in Ferriday, Louisiana, a white man whose steadfast work on a cold-case Klan murder led to a grand-jury investigation. How did this happen? As is often the case in journalism train wrecks, a series of assumptions: A researcher working without a manuscript found a Stanley Nelson with a lot of civil-rights-related work, and assumed. She called a representative of that Stanley who assumed CJR was honoring his client’s work, and was delighted to send a photo. Editors then assumed they had the right face, and never sent the final page proof to the interviewer. And there it is. We apologize—again—to both Stanley Nelsons. This picture, the face of our Stanley Nelson, we’re quite sure, ran with the online version of Hank Klibanoff’s terrific interview.
The Editors are the staffers of the Columbia Journalism Review.