GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISM: A better-than-usual retrospective from the Miami Herald on some of its finer moments. Here are two of the all-time great corrections of printed stories:

``Last Sunday, The Herald erroneously reported that original Dolphin Johnny Holmes had been an insurance salesman in Raleigh, N.C., that he had won the New York lottery in 1982 and lost the money in a land swindle, that he had been charged with vehicular homicide but acquitted because his mother said she drove the car, and that he stated that the funniest thing he ever saw was Flipper spouting water on [coach] George Wilson. Each of these items was erroneous material published inadvertently. He was not an insurance salesman in Raleigh, did not win the lottery, neither he nor his mother was charged or involved in any way with a vehicular homicide, and he made no comment about Flipper or George Wilson. The Herald regrets the errors.''
The explanation? For a ''whatever happened to'' story about the 1966 Dolphins, an editor in sports pounded out some top-of-the-cortex stuff he made up as he sketched out an estimate for the length of the story. The ''dummy type'' came alive when reporters and editors working on the story copied the format and wrote over the fictional words -- except in the case of Johnny Holmes, whose name was typed in but not the real information about him. The dummy type made it into print. Holmes was never heard from.

• When police demanded a correction in 1995, Broward Managing Editor Joe Oglesby obliged: ``A Nov. 18 story about the firing of Oakland Park police officers Brian Rupp and Jay Santalucia incorrectly reported that they allegedly engaged in oral sex with juvenile prostitutes for 23 minutes during a videotaped sting operation. In fact, the tape is 23 minutes long, but the sex act lasted only part of the tape.''

(Via Nancy Nall.)