Good for Seth Mnookin! The journalist has taken the unusual step of including a dedicated corrections section in the paperback version of his book about the New York Times:

Random House will publish the paperback of Seth Mnookin’s 2004 book, “Hard News,” on August 9. An advance copy received by E&P reveals that the book has a new subtitle, a new afterword by the author, and, in a rare move, three pages of corrections.

The subtitle has been changed from “The Scandals at ‘The New York Times’ and Their Meaning for American Media” to “Twenty-one Brutal Months at ‘The New York Times’ and How They Changed the American Media.”

Mnookin says he only made a few errors but, to continue his commitment to “transparency,” he is “offering up a relative rarity in the world of book publishing: a corrections section.”

Most of the corrections (like the Times’) are of a minor scale, such as the executive dining room of the paper being located on the 11th, not 14th floor, and Clyde Haberman stringing from City College of New York, not Columbia University.

The more substantial correction concerns the original’s assertion that two Timesmen, Jon Landman and Jim Roberts, had a testy relationship. Mnookin notes that this was based on a New York magazine story and that Landman tells him that though the two editors are not “drinking buddies,” they do share mutual respect.

It’s a little different than Ann Coulter, who “corrected” one mistake in her error-riddled book Slander, and that correction was itself misleading. Similarly, Michael Moore changed one deceptive caption in his fact-challenged documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” but his correction was, like Coulter’s, still misleading. And many, many other filmmakers and book authors never correct any mistakes. Mnookin deserves credit.