We were wrong.

• Position: Up Front

Many years ago, on this very page as part of a column trying to explain what it is we do BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA and why we do it, I wrote: "Our job is to produce quality in-depth journalism -- to dig into stories behind the news, then deliver what we uncover in a manner that, though at times may be provocative, is always fair, accurate and thorough."

Whether a story is thorough or fair is always open to debate. But as for its accuracy, you can't argue with facts. When you don't get something right, you're wrong. It's as simple as that. And we were wrong -- plumb wrong -- about a fact, and some conclusions drawn from it, in the cover story on CEO pay that appeared in our September issue.

In it, we reported that Wachovia's Ken Thompson got $17.4 million in salary, bonus, stock options and other compensation last year, when his shareholders lost money, with a total return of -3.2%. Wachovia's total return, it turns out, was 16.1%. And that was in a year when total return -- percentage change in stock price, adjusted for splits and dividends -- for the KBW 50 Index of the nation's largest banks was 4.1%. For the S&P 500, it was -10.5%.

We figured total returns for the 75 biggest public companies based in North Carolina by comparing their closing prices on the first and last trading days of the year. Our methodology veered from the norm, which is to compare end-of-year closing prices, but that's not the reason Wachovia's return was so screwed up. In computing it, one of our...