Regret the Error

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Slate published an interesting article by Jeremy Singer-Vine about “What the politics Web site [Politico] deletes from its articles without telling anyone.” From the piece:

… How often does Politico, in the din of the news cycle, make significant changes to its copy after publishing it—without telling readers?
Part of the answer, of course, depends on your definition of the word “significant.” But part of it is simply math. To get the raw numbers, I wrote a series of fairly simple computer programs to monitor changes to all major Politico articles at regular intervals. (Here is more detail than you probably care to know about the programs.) After three weeks and nearly 400 articles, I have my answer: about 3 percent of the time.
By the end of last week, 217 of the 382 articles (57 percent) tracked had been changed in some way. Because the program detects even the most trivial changes, like the deletion of superfluous white space, the vast majority of these changes were unremarkable. Amid hundreds of these trivial changes, however, we found 12 noteworthy alterations. That amounts to 3.1 percent of the articles we monitored.

So were these changes updates or corrections? And, in either case, why didn’t the site acknowledge the changing nature of its articles? The New York Times, for example, requires its continuous news desk to note when articles have been updated. And adding corrections for factual errors is a broad standard in the industry. So is Politico inserting new information without noting it, or is it also deleting errors without adding in corrections? [Be sure to scroll down to read my latest updates to this piece.]

Slate certainly made it seem as though scrubbing is an issue at the website. And then, close to three hours after the Slate piece went live, a correction was added at the top of the piece:

Correction, 6:45 p.m.: Shortly after we published this piece about Politico’s unacknowledged corrections, Politico contacted us to tell us that it had acknowledged almost all these corrections. (Politico appended the corrections after we asked about them but before we published our story.) To see our corrections of our mistakes about their corrections—still with us?—click here.

That’s a notable development considering the response that Politico’s top editor had when first contacted by Slate:

Editor-in-Chief John Harris said: “I’m not sure there needs to be a black-and-white policy.” But Politico “ought to think about” keeping a running list of corrections, and its unwritten policy. Politico’s unwritten policy is to append notices to articles “where something substantive was not correct,” Harris said. In many of the stories cited in the sidebar, Harris acknowledged, “there was no thought or judgment applied.

The fact that most of the problematic Politico articles noted by Slate were corrected after Politico was notified of the changes suggests that the site could indeed benefit from a “black-and-white-policy.” Honestly, though, shouldn’t a good policy be black-and-white, meaning clear? Isn’t that kind of the idea behind creating a policy?

It seems Politico has not been operating with a proper corrections policy, let alone decent procedures. (An unwritten policy is usually no policy at all.) As a result, articles were being changed, facts were being corrected — and nobody was telling readers. Bottom line: scrubbing is unethical and unprofessional. It breaks the contract of correction that has existed between journalists and the public for hundreds of years. If that’s too old school for you, Politico also violated Jeff Jarvis’ newer maxim of “publish and correct.”

Politico needs to get its corrections act together. Scott Rosenberg has also weighed in with a call for “versioning” — a similar approach to how software is updated — as a way to deal with the evolution of news stories on the web. It’s a good suggestion, and I know of one person who is already using this as a way to communicate updates and corrections. As a starting point, Politico needs to draft a clear policy, create the necessary related procedures, educate staff, and implement any necessary technical measures to enable corrections.

Let’s hope this Slate study provides Politico with the motivation to get it done with the kind of speed that the site is so famous for.

UPDATE July 21, 12:00 pm: It’s important to note that the Slate story has resulted in a rather suprising admission by the publication. This was added as an update to its story:

As Politico’s editors also pointed out to us, many of the changes Politico made to its stories would have been permitted under Slate’s own corrections policy. Under Slate’s policy, we do not notify readers about minor corrections that we ourselves catch within 24 hours of publication.

Well, that’s interesting. Hypocritical, too… This is the first I’ve heard of the Slate policy and they should change it. Twenty-four hours is a long time online, and the proper policy is to fix errors and correct them, regardless of time frame. I’m curious as to what is and isn’t a “minor correction” in Slate’s definition, but it seems to me that a factual error or typo that changes the meaning of a sentence should be noted whether you catch it 10 minutes or 10 hours after publication. The idea is to be transparent with your readers. This policy may help editors save time, and writers save face, but it does nothing for readers.

Slate does a lot of things well with their corrections, and I often cite them as an example of a publication that has a good online corrections format. But this is a bad policy and they should change it. There’s a certain sense of karmic justice, though, that Slate’s takedown of Politico has had the unintended effect of shining a light on a misguided Slate policy.

UPDATE July 21, 12:25 pm: Here’s a statement from Tim Grieve, deputy managing editor of Politico:

Slate has now posted no fewer than six separate corrections to its story and the accompanying sidebar, and we’re still pushing them to correct at least one more significant factual error.

They’ve admitted they were wrong about the number of stories on which we posted corrections; they’ve admitted they were wrong about the substance of one of those corrections; they’ve admitted they were wrong on a number of specific stories where they said we hadn’t posted corrections when we had; and they’ve admitted that they misquoted a WRITTEN statement I provided to them. They also mischaracterized comments made by POLITICO’s editor-in-chief; we’re still trying to get them to own up to that one.

Their story now begins with a 50-word correction and ends with a 125-word correction, and the sidebar is studded with doozies like this: “Correction, July 20, 2010: A previous version of this article incorrectly reported that Politico hadn’t yet acknowledged its correction.”

We all make mistakes, of course, and Slate caught us making some: We’ve managed to correct some stories on our site without posting the formal correction notices that our policy requires. We’ve gone back and added correction notices to all of the factual corrections Slate identified, and we’re taking steps to prevent this problem from recurring.

In the meantime, Slate now admits that it doesn’t even try to live up to the standard it would hold us to. I’m not sure if that’s irony or hypocrisy, but either way it probably should have given Slate pause before going on the attack.