Justification for our existence
Back in January, Cynthia Cotts (who has since left the paper) wrote an interesting “Press Clips” column for the Village Voice. Cotts looked at how Slate, The Washington Post and The New York Times handle their online corrections online and made a few suggestions about how things could be improved. Most interesting is this:
Here’s another thorny issue. It is impossible to establish the truth or falsehood of certain propositions, such as whether the pope said, “It is as it was,” or whether the Dean scream means he is unstable. Perhaps online news sites could address this sort of thing by devoting separate pages to Second- and Third-Hand Assertions, Spin We Fell For, and Hidden Agendas.
Cotts also made a call for “an All-Corrections website, a universal library of errors. Think of it as one-stop shopping for researchers, a complete inventory of all corrections, all the time. The home page would link daily to every media outlet’s internally generated corrections, with separate pages for Editors’ Notes, ombud blogs, and independent criticism.”
She said this site “would depend on elegant design and a crack search engine and would work best as a nonprofit, with a paid webmaster and voluntary media participation. Of course, to maintain credibility, the site would itself have to have an ombudsman, a readers’ forum, and a corrections page.”
All excellent ideas, a few of which we have and a few we hope to implement. If you have any suggestions, please send us an email. Also, comments are enabled on this post.
Report an error