Regret the Error

Andrew Alexander, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, is doing a good job on the corrections beat at the paper. Last year, he wrote two columns about the paper’s problems with handling corrections requests (1,2). (See my previous post here.) Yesterday, he followed up with a blog post that includes some good news, along with details about areas that still require improvement. The good news:

… The Post has reversed its embarrassing inattention to correction requests. Since my initial column, section editors have received regular reminders about correction requests that have been pending for more than 14 days. Where a backlog of several hundred neglected requests once existed, the number now is only four. The database shows a handful of other pending requests that are being addressed and corrections likely will appear soon.

Following publication of my first column on March 22 of last year, Assistant Managing Editor Peter Perl successfully pushed the newsroom to whittle down the huge backlog of requests. The task of riding herd on corrections was subsequently passed to Senior Editor Milton Coleman, who started another push several months ago …

Coleman credited two veteran Post copy editors, Bill Walsh and Martha Murdock, with improving corrections to make them “more fulsome, clearer and more transparent.” That’s helpful to readers, who in the past often complained about Post corrections that made it impossible to know the original error.

Where the paper still needs to improve:

Readers periodically complain that their requests for corrections, typically e-mailed to corrections@washpost.com, are never acknowledged. And sometimes it takes too long to run a correction that should have appeared within days.

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