Two stories about the Knight Ridder saga in the past week have resulted in lengthy corrections. This morning the New York Times ran this correction to reporter Damon Darlin’s story on Monday about the troubles at the Mercury News:

An article in Business Day on Monday about plans by the McClatchy Company to sell The San Jose Mercury News and 11 other newspapers that it is acquiring as part of its purchase of Knight Ridder misstated the average operating profit margin at the papers McClatchy is keeping. It is 30.3 percent, McClatchy said, not 12 percent. The article also misstated the number of papers among those being sold whose workers are represented by unions. It is 9, not all 12.

The article also misstated the role of Susan Goldberg in newsroom cuts at The Mercury News and her title at the time. She did not close the paper’s foreign-language weeklies; that decision was made by the publisher. She was managing editor when the paper stopped printing its Sunday magazine and a separate book section; she has since become executive editor.

The article referred incorrectly to the revival of employment in Silicon Valley. The region has regained about 10,000 of the 178,000 jobs it lost since the dot-com collapse; it has not recovered them all.

Remember that Chronicle story that said a couple of KR vice presidents were going to pull down as much as $30 million a piece on stock options following the sale of the newspaper chain? That story was loaded with errors too. Here’s the correction:

An article in Tuesday’s Business section misstated the amounts officers of Knight-Ridder Inc. stand to collect from the sale of the corporation to McClatchy Co. On completion of the sale at the agreed price of $67.25 per share, Chairman and CEO Tony Ridder will receive approximately $14.2 million from sale of stock and $6.5 million from exercise of options, for a total of approximately $20.6 million. That amount would represent proceeds, not profits. Similarly, Senior Vice President Mary Jean Connors would receive approximately $7.6 million from sale of shares and exercise of options; Chief Financial Officer Steven Rossi would get $5.1 million; Finance Vice President Gary Effren would get $2.6 million; and General Counsel Gordon Yamate would get $1.8 million.