Regret the Error

I had a great time speaking to several classes at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University last week. (Thanks again to Dan Gillmor for bringing me there.)

I gave my usual spiel about errors and corrections and all of the other topics I tend to cover. But one thing I don’t usually talk about is how I handle corrections on this website. (I often talk about corrections for the Regret the Error book.) While in Phoenix, a few students asked me about how I deal with corrections here. That set off a “blog post alert” in my mind. So here’s the resulting post — and some new corrections options.

In the Beginning

In the early days of this site, I would place a correction within the post itself and then repeat all of the week’s corrections in a round-up post. The weekly post was borrowed from Slate, and they continue to do this. I did the round-ups until late 2006 and then stopped. I honestly don’t remember why I stopped; but I definitely failed in that I should have explained clearly why I wasn’t going to do the weekly round-ups anymore.

The other thing I started doing from the beginning is credit people by first name when they spot a mistake made by me. I still do that.

Tagging

When I migrated the site from TypePad to WordPress in 2007,  I started using the “regret corrections” tag for all of my corrections. Not that I told you. I should have mentioned this in my post about the new site, but didn’t. That was a mistake.

It was also in 2007 that I started using the * to indicate corrections. The first post to use this method (which was again borrowed from Slate) was my year-end round-up for 2007. From then on, I placed a * at the end of any sentence that required a correction. Then I would place a correction at the bottom of the post and put another * there as well. (Just take a look at the posts listed under “regret corrections.”) The idea is readers can follow the *s to see exactly where the error occurred.

Moving Forward

So that’s where things have been up until today. I’m now announcing a couple of additions to help you track my screw-ups. The first is that any corrected post will have the word “Corrected” added to the headline, as was the case here. The second new element is a dedicated RSS feed for my corrections. Subscribe here. I’m also promoting this feed in the upper right hand corner of the site.

One other thing: Since launch, I have placed all of the corrections to my non-Regret work on this site. Since 2007, I’ve used the “craig’s correction” tag for these outside corrections. I will continue to post these on this site, and I’ll continue to use that tag. But now you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of these corrections. (This feed is also listed in the upper right.)

Do you have any other suggestions? Let me know in the comments.

Oh, and thanks ASU students!

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