I’ve been forced to confront my own errors, and I like it. The adherence to respect for “the facts” that comes with studying at an actual journalism school has hit me hard. Before stepping onto the MU campus, I rarely put much thought into how the facts beneath words and thoughts were transferred from reality to a reporter’s notebook to a published piece online.

At the University of Maryland—Baltimore County, my alma mater, I learned the basics of reporting largely from my peers, practice or from reading in my spare time (something I am notoriously bad at doing.) The two English department professors of the practice that I learned from emphasized curt prose, a direct and confrontational attitude toward those in power and the importance of crossing fault lines. They did not emphasize workflow or the function of our work in the real world.

At The Retriever Weekly, our student paper, there were no accuracy checks nor many editors who had the time or ability to check every statement. Reporters there wrote whatever they wanted with reckless abandon, unless it struck an editor as offensive or inappropriate for the audience. That is the sort of editing process you get when there is no journalistic authority cultivating a culture of professionalism and of strict adherence to what is just and correct.

I can think back to pieces I ran as editor that I probably should not have, and that probably had some kind of negative effect on someone’s life. I regret the errors, all of them—while at the time I dismissed such mistakes as “part of being a college paper,” I understand now the gravity of a wrong number or claim and how that can overturn an individual’s livelihood.

MU, by contrast, has institutionalized a respect for the truth, and it bleeds into the practice of reporting at all times and at all levels.

In the pre-semester boot camp, we learned of accuracy checks. We were told that most reporters would be shocked by the level of error in their stories were they all to carry such checks out.

We were run through a fictional drill in which we were expected to get detail after detail correct, and as a group and as individuals we failed, and hard. The exercise was, of course, slanted out of our favor. Still, my stomach turned when I was chastised for my failings. I know others’ did, too.

In accuracy checks since, I’ve found my own errors and have been forced to confront the seriousness of a misplaced word or concept. I am still uncomfortable with some changes to my copy – changing a word to be more accurate to the source’s intent than to exactly what I heard, for example, still grates me even if sometimes making that change is the right thing to do – but these changes have made me confront the fact that my credibility lies not with adherence to my observations, necessarily, but to how I carry myself as a reporter.