I want you to trust me. But if you don’t, I understand, although I think you’re making a mistake.

You wouldn’t read a newspaper if you thought it was unreliable, unless you thought it had comedic value (and I know you’re out there; I love you, too). Getting it right is the most important thing to a journalist.

This is the 174th and final publication of the Iowa State Daily under my watch. During that one-year period, my words haven’t appeared much in the paper — I’ve been busy with other things. I wrote an editorial each week, the occasional news article and not much else.

Except for corrections.

They run in the bottom-right corner of our front page, and I’ve written almost all of them since last May. In a sordid way, it’s one of my favorite duties. Why? Because corrections are about getting it right.

Journalists are fond of saying that mistakes happen, which is fine because it’s true. But too often that saying is twisted into an excuse for errors — an “eh, what are you gonna do?” shrug of the shoulders.

During the last year, we’ve misquoted you or truncated your quotes. We’ve mislabeled your affiliations. We’ve twice sent you to the wrong time and place for public forums. We’ve misrepresented your views. We’ve reversed countless close pairs: Des Moines and West Des Moines, city police and county sheriff, karate and tae kwon do, merger and combination, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and yes, “lap-dancing” instead of “tap-dancing.”

I’m told there have even been some spelling mistakes. And we’ve made so many mistakes in covering the lawsuit against the ISU Foundation that I think I owe Dan Saftig and Jason Menke Christmas cards.

Two errors in the Daily I particularly regret.

In March, we didn’t say, exactly, that Henry Alliger, then Government of the Student Body speaker of the senate, was drunk silly during a meeting. But we insinuated it pretty heavily — and used some unintentional embellishing to do it. That’s not cool. Alliger told me that he’s been over it for a long time, but I was not over it until I wrote this paragraph — because you deserve to know the truth and because we lied to you. Last week, a day after the worst production disaster of the year, I wanted nothing more than to get the paper published on time. To that end, on my orders, we published a story about Barton Hall that had no business being published because we had to guess some of the facts in it.

I want commitment to accuracy, at the expense of all other concerns, to be my defining professional characteristic. By extension, I’ve tried to make that the defining characteristic of the Daily this year.

Errors work against that sort of credibility. But corrections build it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think everyone deserves to be able to believe what they read in this newspaper. If you don’t, I hope you will tell incoming editors Kathryn Fiegen and Tom Barton, because I know they care and will try to restore your trust. You can reach them at 515-294-5688, at [email protected] or in our offices at 108 Hamilton Hall.

That’s it. I have run out of room.

A Cyclone until I die, a child of God until then and beyond, I wish each of you well as you and I now go our separate ways.