Are you talking weekly or daily in your experience?

To be perfectly honest, major dailies just can't afford to be sloppy.

I'm not going to fire off a debate about the relative practices of The Chron v. The Oregonian (both top 25 newspapers), but I will speak on first reference about _my_ paper's accuracy practices: The Oregonain is very heavy on those who cause printable corrections and clarifications.

For example, I made a stupid, factual mistake last week (only my fourth in 15 years) that I had to write an official correction for.

It had to do with the fact that I composed a 7-inch story on a page whose template file name just happened to be identical to a file name in a writer's desk! Big mistake! Never assume!!

I felt horrible. And I was called on the carpet for my (unharmful) mistake. But readers are, well forgivably, unforgiving of factual errors.