Sidebar: ? How to Minimize Inheriting Misspellings ? Sample Corrections Policies If you think we've entered a new millenium, check again. If you once penned a piece about CBS' Leslie Stahl or Washington Post first lady Katherine Graham or singer/actress Barbara Streisand, you can take slight comfort in the numbers. You've got plenty of company.

And if you think news organizations correct most of their mistakes, join me on a journey through the choppy surf of database searches in a bigger, faster digital age.

That's right. For the record, it's millennium, Lesley, Katharine and Barbra.

But don't count on finding that out in a quick and dirty search on deadline. Rarely are news organizations steering the way with corrections, flags or sirens in their databases online. You've got to be vigilant (or is it vigilent?).

Librarians at The Boston Globe know that well. One, Marc Shechtman, tells the story of a green librarian asked on her first week at work to check the spelling of Katharine Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post and CEO of its parent company.

'She just typed Katharine Graham (into a database), and she had Katharine wrong and Graham wrong,' he said. Nonetheless, the database provided a handful of published stories matching the spelling she'd conjured up. And so the whole wrong name, first and last, appeared in print -- or so Shechtman thinks.

'It's a notorious story in the library and it's been told many times,' he said, after searching for and failing to find a correction for the mistake in the paper's database. 'I hope it's true.'

If that one isn't, this one is. Late one night in spring 1999, I came back from a speech by lawyer-turned-inmate-turned-commentator John Dean and sat down to file one of the 'Muddling Through Midlife' columns I was writing for Syracuse, N.Y., newspapers. Dean had told a story about Stahl I wanted to use. So, through Emerson College's library, I logged onto Dialog, a database of Boston Globe stories (password required). 'Leslie Stahl' produced 27 hits, five in lead paragraphs. The number seemed substantial, the handful I checked hadn't been flagged with a correction, and I didn't find the 140+ matches for 'Lesley' until my story was in print.

It's never been hard to get things wrong in this business. But the speed with which error can spread in this digital age provides one more reason to heed that journalistic admonition, 'If your mother says she loves you, check it out.'

None of us like to admit our messes. Leslie, make that Lesley, wasn't my first. (OK. She wasn't my second either.) But this time I felt sandbagged. Had the name 'Leslie Stahl' appeared just two, three or four times in the database, I believe I would have been alert to the likelihood it was wrong, even as late as the hour -- and my story -- were. More to the point, a prominently-placed notation that any of the articles had been corrected or that Stahl's first name was wrong would have helped me from becoming one more entry in the burgeoning databank of misspellings.

'As Pogo would say, 'We have met the enemy and he is us,'' said Mildred Simpson, manager of archiving services in the library of the Los Angeles Times.

Take something as simple as the word 'millennium.' Type it with one 'n' in The Globe's database and 362 stories match.

'The way you remember millennium is the way you remember Minnelli as in Liza Minnelli,' said the Times' Simpson. 'It's two l's and two n's every time.'

Of course, plenty of people can't remember Liza's last name either. Type 'singer' and 'Liza Minelli' -- note one 'n' again -- into The Globe's database and 18 articles with the incorrect spelling pop up. Type the name with two n's and the number leaps to 116.

Spelling, I realize, is not a sexy subject. Perhaps that's why it is so easily dismissed when considering the broad array of accuracy and ethical issues in both traditional media and what some have called the Wild West of the Web.

Who cares whether it's Katherine, Kathryn or Kate in a news world so complex that reporters at the Dallas Morning News can't cover local television without tripping over potential conflict-of-interest concerns raised by their paper's ever-closer relationship to a station owned by the same parent company?

What's a mere misspelled name when the tricky terrain of the Web produces anything from urban legend and outright hoax to the embellished and error-ridden tale circulated this month about the misery shared by the signers of the Declaration of Independence? (The real misery, it seems, befell Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, suspended for four months without pay after he picked up the Founding Fathers' myth, fact-checked at least some of it himself and penned a column that inexplicably failed to tell readers from where the idea had come.)

Larry Marion, a veteran journalist whose Newton, Mass., company, Triangle Publishing Services Co., produces Web content for a variety of clients, put it this way: 'When you are in a burning building, are you going to worry about the shrubbery in front of the building? Sometimes errors and typos are the shrubbery in front of the building. They aren't a priority.'

But the concept of accuracy has to start somewhere, just as the concept of fire safety in the tinder-dry western states begins, in fact, by cutting back shrubbery near houses so they don't burst into flames to begin with.

If for no other reasons than that readers care and that writers turn to news' archives to find facts, not falsehood, correcting even the littlest things should become a priority for all.

'Conventional wisdom is that people will think ill of us (in the news business) if we print too many corrections,' said Narda Zacchino, associate editor and readers' representative at the Los Angeles Times. But, she noted, a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors has shown the opposite -- and resoundingly so.

'The vast majority of readers feel a newspaper's credibility goes up when it corrects mistakes,' she said.

So is anybody listening? The databases of such companies as Dialog and LEXIS-NEXIS commonly contain dozens of stories in which prominent figures with even mildly challenging names find those names mangled in perpetuity.

Want to read about New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in LEXIS-NEXIS? Or is it Guiliani? If LEXIS-NEXIS' database can be trusted, The New York Times this March used the second -- and wrong -- spelling of the mayor's last name in two lead paragraphs on the same day. It's not as if the mayor is a newly elected introvert. But neither article as reproduced in LEXIS-NEXIS noted the misspelling or corrected it. (Overall, when I typed in 'Guiliani' and 'mayor,' LEXIS-NEXIS spit out 136 articles that had appeared in major newspapers.)

Error shows no partisanship either. Hillary Clinton, who everyone assumed Giuliani would challenge for a U.S. Senate seat in New York State until he dropped from the race, frequently appears as 'Hilary' in news reports around the world. While the First Lady's name crops up as wrong in only four stories in major newspapers indexed on LEXIS-NEXIS, Hilary -- with one 'l' -- came up as a match on 3,019 Web pages when I typed 'Hilary Clinton' and 'first lady' into google.com. Yes, I know. No doubt a fair number toward the end said something like, 'Hilary Clinton, first baseman and first lady of the Alamo Bees softball team.' But a whole lot near the top led directly to articles, speeches and other events that got the real First Lady's name wrong.

Spurred by reader complaints and the ASNE study, Zacchino has led an effort at the Los Angeles Times to build a consistent and comprehensive program of setting the record straight. She said the full policy will be introduced to the paper's readers in a column later this month.

While she wouldn't provide all the policy's details, she did say, 'We are going to be really consistent about correcting our mistakes.'

Otherwise, she noted, news organizations 'just perpetuate the errors.'

Which reminds me. I sure hope no one in Syracuse is rooting around in the newspaper's archive for the correct spelling of a newswoman named Stahl.