Aaaarrrrgh! That was the sound you heard Tuesday from the editors' offices on the third floor of The News & Observer building. Maybe it echoed around some readers' kitchen tables that morning too, as folks read the seven -- count 'em, seven -- corrections that ran on page 2A of the paper.

How could the newspaper be so bad, some of you ask. "Seems like a day doesn't go by when you don't have corrections," said one recent caller. "It would be embarrassing to me if I owned the company."

It's true. There is nothing more crushing to a reporter or editor -- I can tell you from painful experience -- than to have an error dumped in your lap when you get to work. It's the bastard child that belongs irrefutably to you.

The N&O had a bad run of corrections last week, 12 as of Friday. The unmagnificent seven in Tuesday's paper were a record for Managing Editor John Drescher's two-year tenure at The N&O, occasioning a lengthy memo to the staff from the newsroom's top brass.

Errors are a source of embarrassment, yes, but even more they're a corrosive to the newspaper's credibility. If the paper can't get the basic stuff right -- names, spellings, locations, dates, math -- how can we be trusted to report the affairs of the day with accuracy, completeness, reliability? Let alone fairness.

Last week's foul-ups were a pretty good sampling of the kinds of errors that occur in The N&O. They included a name misspelling, quotes attributed to the wrong person, inaccurate financial information, an incorrect vote total from a public meeting and, in a map, placement of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

The N&O is geographically challenged. The previous week, it reported that the N.C. General Assembly traveled "140 miles west" from Raleigh to celebrate the town of Bath's 300th anniversary. That front-page error, Drescher figured, found its way past at least five pairs of eyeballs to reach yours -- the reporter, assigning editor, copy editor, front-page editor and news editor. (I missed it too. How many of you noticed? Raise your hands.)

But the paper did correct the error, and that's a point that needs to be made here. Readers think papers are loath to admit their mistakes, publicly, and that's partially true. But Dan Barkin, deputy managing editor, says this paper is quicker to 'fess up than most he's worked for.

I don't have any way to know if that's true, but I did compare raw numbers with some of my fellow public editors at other papers. The N&O last year ran 581 corrections, compared to 584 at the Kansas City Star, 709 at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 717 at the Orlando Sentinel, 750 at the Arizona Daily Star and 888 at The Portland Oregonian.

You should want to see a certain number of corrections in your paper, by the way. A newspaper that is aggressive, enterprising, taking on complex issues and covering local news extensively will make more mistakes than a play-it-safe sheet that fills its pages with wire stories. And a paper that doesn't own up to mistakes is not being honest with its readers.

There is a system at The N&O, you should know, for handling corrections. (To report an error, call 829-8949 or e-mail accuracy@newsobserver.com) When an error is brought to the paper's attention, the reporter or other person responsible is required to fill out a form explaining the error and the reason it occurred.

The form is used not for punitive purposes, Barkin says, but to root out ongoing sources of problems and -- crucially -- to correct the newspaper's archives, upon which future stories are based. A pattern of errors, however, would become a topic for discussion at a staffer's next performance review.

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