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Last year, the Star published the fewest number of corrections in my six years as reader advocate. Every department decreased its number over the previous year, which reflects renewed and ongoing vigilance.

"We take accuracy very seriously and we rarely get the story wrong. The devil is in the details. It's our responsibility to get those details right and to keep accuracy at the forefront of every discussion," Managing Editor Teri Hayt said.

In 2007, the Star corrected 595 errors on A2 or in its weekly sections, a reduction of nearly 25 percent from the 791 in 2006. It's the best year-end tally since error tracking began in earnest in 2001 by using a database.

Each correction is tallied by kind of mistake and who made the error. A note of explanation and corrective action is required.

Corrections for the weather page and TV Week are not tallied: Information for both is purchased from providers that send it ready to be published. When information is wrong, the company gets a call or e-mail.

In addition, typos and grammatical mistakes are not corrected unless they are in proper nouns or in headlines.

Newspapers set their own standards for publishing corrections and few disclose their annual totals.

For example, in 2007 the Orlando Sentinel was essentially flat year to year with 772 corrections or clarifications and cited newsroom cutbacks for an increase in the second half of the year.

The Florida Times-Union ran 291 corrections or clarifications in 2007, a 15 percent decrease, and credited it to improved accountability.

For the nearly two years I've overseen the A2 corrections, the mandate from Publisher and Editor John M. Humenik has been to reduce errors so that the Star can be more credible.

The Star held two mandatory "accuracy refresher" classes last year to discuss progress and goals and to listen to colleagues speak about what they do to make sure the information they gather is correct.

All employees are expected to follow an accuracy checklist. In addition, each department created procedures to follow to help avert mistakes. Many of the protocols are common sense — calling a phone number from the computer screen before the number is published.

Another protocol is to double-type names — Debbie Kornmiller Debbie Kornmiller — to make sure that you haven't made a typo twice, but you have to have correct information from the start. That was one of the biggest successes of 2007.

Reporters reduced by a third the wrong information given to the them that was published. This resulted in 58 fewer corrections.

Another improvement was that reader utility information — time, date, location, phone number, price, e-mail address, URLs — also decreased by a third, from 136 to 90. These kind of mistakes are particularly egregious because they waste people's time.

Contact the reporter, the section editor or me. You can e-mail anyone at the Star by his or her first initial and last name followed by @azstarnet.com. Phone numbers for reporters generally are at the end of the story; section editors' phone numbers are on the section front below the section name.