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Andrew Alexander, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, dedicated his weekend column to the issue of corrections. Back in March, he blew the whistle on the fact that the paper’s corrections policy and procedures were failing readers.
Sunday’s column is something of a follow up. It also revealed that at the end of November the Post had published “about 950 corrections” this year. Alexander began by explaining that the Post often takes weeks or months to publish corrections:
The Post’s internal policies say that when readers point out mistakes, the response should be “prompt.” But too often, reporters and editors move at a snail’s pace to correct errors.
Despite improvement, an analysis of Post corrections this year showed that reported errors routinely went uncorrected for weeks or even months. Many were indisputable and should have been corrected in the following day’s paper.
In the Internet age, this kind of tardiness can be especially damaging. The longer inaccurate information lives on, the greater the risk that it will spread far beyond The Post’s readership. Dawdling on errors also weakens the bond of trust with readers who took the trouble to report them. They become justifiably cynical about The Post’s commitment to accuracy.
Alexander is on point with his criticism. Corrections should not take weeks or months to appear. He cited several examples where the paper dragged its feet. Even more interestingly, he provided a bit of an insider’s view as to how the paper’s corrections process is supposed to work:
Each month, corrections “monitors” in Post news departments are e-mailed a statistical analysis of pending and approved requests. It arrives with a standard admonishment: “It is very important that monitors handle correction requests in a timely fashion.”
Rather than emailing this to the appointed monitors once a month, why doesn’t the paper create an internal corrections-request tracking system that’s similar to software bug trackers? (I’m an unpaid advisor to MediaBugs, a Knight Foundation-funded project aiming to build something along these lines, albeit for public, rather than internal, use.) A system like this could provide automated alerts that make sure the monitors know when they’re falling behind. Also, the senior editorial people responsible for tracking corrections would be able to see which requests are still in the queue. An email once a month simply isn’t enough.
That said, a Post senior editor also raised a few other issues:
Senior Editor Milton Coleman said that an increased workload for editors, coupled with organizational changes and the temporary relocation of staffers during a months-long newsroom renovation, have caused “large gaps” in the corrections process.
But ultimately, he said, the remedy is that “someone has to be tasked with following up on a regular basis” to see that correction requests are being quickly handled.
These are valid problems, but there’s a larger point here: the Post’s internal corrections process isn’t scalable or adaptable. Some staffers get laid off, take buyouts or are reassigned, and the whole thing grinds to a near-halt. That’s not a good system.
Coleman told Alexander that’s he’s been tasked with helping improve the way things work. I suggest he step back from the micro-level issues and examine whether the paper could create a new, scalable process that enforces a higher level of accountability.
Crack the whip on people all you want, but I think the Post’s system/process, or lack thereof, is failing the paper.
