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I’m a bit late announcing this, but I’ve started writing a weekly column for Columbia Journalism Review’s website. It’s called “Regret the Error” and runs every Friday on CJR.org. I’ve written eight columns so far, and you can read them all here.
This column is a chance for me to provide some context for notable corrections and errors. I also include the week’s best corrections and apologies. Below are links to some recent columns, and I’ll be posting my latest offering to the site each week.
Everything Old Is New Again
Just over two months ago, shares of UAL, the parent company of United Airlines, fell by as much as 76 percent. The root cause of the drop in price was a Chicago Tribune article published on the website of Florida’s Sun-Sentinel that reported United was filing for bankruptcy. Eventually, the story found its way onto Google News, where…
The Art of the Fake Correction
The groups responsible for this week’s fake edition of The New York Times took great care to produce a newspaper that looked like the real thing. They mimicked the paper’s fonts and layout, included an imagined column by Thomas Friedman, and even launched an accompanying website. Regular Times readers also experienced the familiar sensation of finding…
Apologies Not Acceptable
The Washington Post’s correction policy has some elegant turns of phrase, including “Preventing and correcting mistakes are two sides of the coin of our realm: accuracy.” But it says nothing about apologies. Could that be because “The Washington Post doesn’t apologize”?
That quote was attributed to a Post editor in an e-mail published by the Washington City…
Weapons of Mass Reduction
In its most basic and useful form, a correction fixes erroneous reporting and provides a public admission for an error. Though it rarely tops 100 words, the correction, when properly deployed, can also be transformed into a weapon of mass reduction (as in ego).
Witness, for example, The Washington Post’s choice of words this week when correcting…
A Treasury of Page Six Corrections
Gossip is a cutthroat business. It’s also an error-prone one.
Mistakes are inevitable when you trade in rumors and rely on “spies” and self-interested publicists to feed you product. Or, yes, when you simply make things up in order to sell magazines or newspapers.
The New York Post’s Page Six, the grande dame of old school gossip columns, has had…
Ils Regretteront L’Erreur
Le Monde, a highly respected French newspaper, committed an error so egregious on Wednesday that its editors believed the only way to correct their mistake was to publish a front page apology.
Had the paper falsely accused someone of a crime, or damaged a company’s stock price as a result of incorrect reporting? Maybe it had discovered an incident of…
