Getting it right ... an illusive, humbling goal.

• Author: McCormally, Timothy J.

Regular readers of this column may recall that my father was the editor of daily newspapers in the midwest. One of his favorite writers was Mark Twain, especially after our family moved in the mid-1960s from the Kansas prairie to the banks of the Mississippi River in Iowa. Looking over something I wrote, my father, pencil in hand, would invariably quote Twain's aphorism that the difference between the right word and the wrong word is equivalent to the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. He also taught the immutability of certain deadlines and the importance of balancing the desire to "get it right" with the need to "get it done." A corollary of this truism is that, if you make a mistake in Monday's paper, you can--and should--correct it on Tuesday.

I am not sure what my father would make of the ability to continually update web pages and blog entries, but my surmise is that he would embraced it. Misspelling a name in a wedding announcement or an obituary, he often said, was the worst thing you could do: No matter how sincere your apology, the aggrieved person's disappointment (or anger) would not dissipate, if at all, until a correction was published. A photograph of Ken and Barbie's wedding may be insignificant to 99.99 percent of your readers, but it would be the most important thing in the paper to Ken, Barbie, their families, and their friends. "Correct it as fast as you can," my father said, "and then move on."

I think of my father's counsel often, not only when I'm correcting a too-hastily posted item in the TEI News Feed (sometimes within minutes of its posting), but also when members let us know we misspelled their name (or misidentified their position) in an item in The Tax Executive. With a bimonthly magazine, of course, the correction has to wait, and an erroneous item in a periodical will persist for as long as the magazine is retained. The delay is frustrating, but it is nothing like that associated with (and the lasting nature of) errors in less frequent publications.

Which brings us to the topic of this column: TEI's Membership Roster. The roster, which was mailed in early October, is an invaluable tool for TEI members. But it comes out only once a year and it is only as good as its information is accurate. Since the roster hit members' desks, we received quite a few calls or emails, providing updates, correcting errors, and asking why a member's name is not included.

First, our apologies for the errors or...