That day The News & Observer had run a front-page story saying a burglar had broken into a restaurant by ripping through the interior dry wall of the Curves for Women center next door. The story said Curves was vacant.

The story was wrong. The crime occurred in a Slender Lady fitness center, now closed, not the Curves for Women in a different shopping center several miles down the road.

The owner wanted the public to know that Curves for Women was very much open for business -- she'd already gotten several calls from customers asking whether Curves had closed. "January is our biggest month for new business, and I don't want people to think we're closed," she said.

Sure enough, The N&O had gotten the fitness centers mixed up. The paper ran a correction, after checking the information with police.

A small enough mistake, unintended, and understandable that it occurred. But the incident does remind us that small errors can have larger consequences. Not to mention misinforming or confusing the public. And -- drip, drip, drip -- eroding the newspaper's credibility with readers over time.

Errors are the low-grade virus of newspapers -- always there, mostly benign, sometimes flaring up in maddening eruptions of inaccuracy. In an era of public mistrust of the "mainstream media," fed by Internet scrutiny of the news, errors are dangerous to the long-term health of newspapers.

"Errors are a major contributor to an erosion in the level of trust in the press," writes Craig Silverman in a new book, "Regret the Error." "Once this trust begins to be lost, the rights of the press and indeed of speech itself are threatened. It is then a matter of time until laws are enacted that impinge on the press's right to publish accurate reports and alternate views that inform and encourage public discourse."

That someone could produce a 366-page book on newspaper errors -- or that anyone would read it -- is a surprise to me. But Silverman has plenty of material to work with, unfortunately, and his book is getting a lot of interest from those of us in the inky trade. He cites some amusing examples:

* From Newsweek: "In the original version of this report, Newsweek misquoted Falwell as referring to 'assault ministry.' In fact, Falwell was referring to 'a salt ministry,' -- a reference to Matthew 5:13, where Jesus says, 'Ye are the salt of the earth.' "

* From The Daily Mail (UK): "Mr Smith said in court, 'I am terribly sorry. I have a dull life and I suddenly wanted to break away.' He did not say, as we reported erroneously, 'I have a dull wife and I suddenly wanted to break away.' We apologise to Mr Smith, and to Mrs Smith."

Some of my favorite corrections come from The New York Times, which is scrupulous to the point of anal about correcting errors. Here's one from last summer (Forgive the length, but it's worth it):

"An article in some copies on Wednesday about congressional efforts to pass legislation to expand the government's electronic wiretapping powers misspelled -- yet again -- the surname of the attorney general of the United States, in three of four references. He is Alberto R. Gonzales, not Gonzalez. (The Times has misspelled Mr. Gonzales's name in at least 14 articles dating to 2001 when he became White House counsel. This year alone Mr. Gonzales's name has been misspelled in February and March, and in two articles in April.)"

The News & Observer, until recently anyway, has not been as forthcoming. I've been corresponding for the better part of a year with a Raleigh reader named David Thomas, who monitors N&O corrections and is irritated by those he considers incomplete. Here's an example from last year:

"A brief in Sunday's City & State section wrongly indicated that Raleigh attorney Charles Becton will be the first black president of the N.C. Bar Association. He will be the first black man to lead the association when he takes office next year."

What was wrong with the original story? The correction didn't tell us, as several readers did, that Allyson Duncan, now a federal Appeals Court judge, was the first black president of the association. That would have been worth sharing with readers.

"I think sometimes it's very confusing not to know what the error was," Thomas said. "The correction will say 'We made a mistake. Here's the right thing.' But we don't know what the mistake was. I'd call that a half a correction."

Thomas argues for a "recycling bin" standard for corrections. Don't send him to his recycled papers to retrieve the original article so he can understand the correction.

Linda Williams, N&O senior editor who oversees corrections, says relief is at hand. "There was a sort of format that discouraged people from restating the error," she said. "We're changing that whole idea and trying to write corrections that make it clear what was wrong and what is correct."

Williams said the paper also is doing more staff training to prevent errors and encouraging readers to alert the paper to errors. There is an e-mail address -- accuracy@newsobserver.com -- to send notice of errors, and the paper has started a computer database of errors to better identify how they occur and can be prevented.

Maybe it's working. The N&O in 2007 printed 553 corrections, reversing a three-year upward trend that reached 680 in 2006. "I hope the reason we're having fewer errors is that we're doing a better job of prevention," Williams said. But she's also concerned about the impact of recent staff losses of copy editors and design editors, who are the last defense in catching mistakes.

"You can do a lot of training to prevent people from making errors," she said. "But a lot of errors are caught because you're reading a proof and it jumps out on the page when you see it. My concern is that we won't have the time to do that last step when someone looks at it and catches it on the page."

The paper did manage to reduce corrections despite having fewer people last year. Let's hope that continues.