Is Attention to Detail a Lost Skill Among Journalists?

-first published in Substack blog “The “Last Editor” on November 5, 2025

Way back when I was a student at the world’s first and best school of journalism, back in the late 1970s, I soon learned it was a rite of passage to master the skills taught in News 105, the basic newswriting course all students had to pass to continue with their journalism education. The course was designed to be tough—very tough—to weed out those without enough skill or commitment to become journalists.

Taught by grizzled newspaper veterans who didn’t know the meaning of the word “nurture,” one of their most frightening promises was to give a grade of F to any assignment that contained even a single factual error. Misspell the name of a city council member, get an F. Call it Vandiver Street instead of Vandiver Drive, get an F—you get the point. I fared well in the class, taught by legendary professor Jane Clark when I took it in the fall of 1979, never once committing a fact error and getting the dreaded failing grade.

Now, flash forward to my decades on the faculty of that very same school.

I did my best to hold students accountable to the facts when doing my own grading. Running the TV newsroom, I wanted to be sure that not only did students get all the facts correct, but they had to pronounce it all correctly on the air, too. Screw up either one of those things and get a failing grade for that shift. I believe this grading regimen fit the expectations of the students, as they had the desire for error-free reporting drilled into them in every course. But as the years progressed and the generations changed, I did see an alarming growth in the number of errors I was encountering in news copy—thankfully before they made air in most cases. As the Millennial generation arrived in the newsroom, the frequency of factual errors shot up quickly. That generation had the bad luck of following Gen X, clearly the generation most suited to become journalists. Gen Xers are tough, skeptical, detail-oriented and no-nonsense. Millennials in many ways are just the opposite, having been raised by well-intentioned Baby Boomers whose overprotective approach to parenting left their children less sure of their own skills and less able to develop professional talents at the same rate as earlier generations. There also seemed to be a built-in lack of attention to details that was, to say the least, alarming for anyone trying to manage an error-free newsroom.

As Millennials became the largest segment of the U.S. workforce—including in journalism—I could see the number of factual errors across journalism rise.

I would see errors in print—often never corrected—errors on broadcasts and, perhaps most frequently, errors in online stories. I’m talking about actual errors of fact here, not just problems with spelling or grammar (which also exploded and which I will explore at some later point in another post). While I know most journalists want to deliver content that is 100 percent without error, we have fallen down on the job and let too much slip past.

The most recent glaring example of this would be funny if it weren’t a sign of such a serious problem. I had only seen the part of this story that contained the error—and didn’t even know it was an error—until my friend Brian Feeney pointed me to the rest of the story. It involved a piece in the Times of London, a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper that has enjoyed a sterling reputation over the years in a market filled with a host of newspapers that offer differing levels of credibility. One of the paper’s reporters, Bevan Hurley (who appears to be either an elder Millennial or a late-stage Gen Xer) reported that former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio had some harsh things to say about then-mayoral candidate (now mayor-elect) Zohran Mamdani and his plans for the city. The piece quoted de Blasio as saying Mamdani’s financial math didn’t add up and that he could not accomplish all his platform laid out for the city. The piece was widely quoted in American media as showing a rift among Democrats over the Mamdani candidacy. The problem was that former New York mayor Bill de Blasio never said any of those things about Mamdani. But New York wine dealer Bill DeBlasio (a childhood friend of Brian Feeney) did. You see, the Times reporter reached out by email to an account he assumed belonged to the former mayor, reaching the wine merchant instead.

That DeBlasio claims, as someone used to getting emails intended for the former mayor, he decided to go ahead and answer the reporter’s questions while never claiming to be the former mayor. The reporter never asked if the DeBlasio replying was the former mayor, even when checking back later to say which quotes from the email he would use in the piece. Once the former mayor decried the piece (he is a strong supporter of Mamdani and his platform) and editors investigated, it was clear the reporter didn’t do the necessary and basic fact checking to be sure he was corresponding with the right person. Lack of attention to detail ends up costing a reputable newspaper a little bit of that reputation.

Why does a mistake like this matter?

First, fact errors can rapidly multiply in the current media landscape. Had only British readers seen the piece with the false de Blasio, it would have just been an unfortunate spreading of some false information to foreign citizens not involved in this U.S. race. But the piece was picked up in American media and touted heavily on right-leaning platforms like Fox News, spreading false information to, among others, people voting in the New York election. Who knows how many changed their votes away from Mamdani based on what they thought was opposition from a former New York mayor (It’s important I mention here that I don’t think this was a right-wing plot by a Murdoch publication to torpedo Mamdani’s campaign. There appears to have been no collusion between wine dealer DeBlasio and the paper to have him play the part of the former mayor. I do believe the reporter reached the wrong person by chance and that person happened to have strong negative feelings toward Mamdani and was willing share them as something of a joke).

Beyond the obvious spread of misinformation for New York voters and those interested in politics in this country, mistakes like this add fuel to the fire of critics of journalism saying audiences can’t believe what we report.

Those accusations are usually centered on false claims of bias in our work. But actual instances of reporting errors that lead to stories that are, as in this case, 100 percent wrong just provide more ammunition to use against us. We as journalists are in a constant struggle to prove our value to the public, working against a decades long campaign to discredit what we air and publish to protect political interests that don’t fare well when examined by solid reporting. We can’t provide aid to our enemies in this fight by serving up false stories for them to use against us.

Those Mizzou professors who decided fact errors would earn an F knew what they were doing. They did more for me than build a fear of getting a bad grade. They lit a fire that has provided energy to a career-long desire to stamp out errors and make sure everything my newsroom reported was as accurate as possible. I hope my teaching was able to do the same for my students. We need that desire to burn as brightly now as it ever has.