Taking corrections to the next level
Matt Thompson, a fellow the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, wrote an interesting post about corrections for his Newsless blog. He notes the limitations of the online corrections pages of some newspaper websites, and also calls for a new way of pushing corrections out to readers:
We could do much more with corrections, of course. At a minimum, corrections should be databased. This shouldn’t be any more difficult than adding a correction field to each story in our CMS, instead of just writing our corrections into the body of the story itself. It would allow readers to search for corrections by date, section or author, rather than having to check the corrections page every day to see what’s been corrected recently.
We should also be much more proactive about getting corrections to readers. If you read something on our news site that has changed or been corrected since you last saw it, we should alert you of the change during your next visit to our site.
His second paragraph offers an idea that fits with my corrections and accuracy wishes for 2009. Thompson also had this interesting suggestion:
About four years ago, I daydreamed about an independent, crowd-sourced corrections site that would allow anyone to post a correction or clarification to information contained at any URI. In some ways, with the ubiquity of browser plug-ins and the like, that type of thing would be easier today.
It is easier today, and SpinSpotter is probably the most interesting initiative trying to make this happen.
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