October 13, 2008 – 8:00 am
In today’s Times, Noam Cohen looks at how fake news ends up being reported as true:
IN 1864, back when rumor still traveled by foot, a young messenger walked into the newsrooms of New York City’s press row with an Associated Press bulletin that President Lincoln had ordered the conscription of 400,000 additional troops for the [...]
For many years, the Mainichi Daily News, the English website of Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, was the place to go if you wanted to read salacious articles about the sexual habits of the Japanese. The stories, which were featured in the site’s “WaiWai” column, frequently stretched believability. Here’s a list of stories published on its [...]
A few hours before I received my award from the National Press Club in Washington, I paid a visit to the Newseum. It’s housed in a lovely new building, but I mostly cared about the bathrooms.
As was the case at its old location, the Newseum bathroom walls are covered in corrections, errors and other press [...]
Adrian Monck alerted me to a remarkable passage from a Press Gazette story about a court case against a British broadcaster. As background, the story reported that, “ITV Central “was fined £25,000 for contempt of court after it ran a news item about a trial which was about to start - and included details of [...]
An article last Sunday about the TV series “Mad Men” referred incorrectly to the history of original series on its network, AMC. “Mad Men” is AMC’s first scripted drama series; the show is not AMC’s maiden voyage in original programming. (That occurred with “Remember WENN,” a comedy about a radio station that ran on the [...]
From a column by Express-News public editor Bob Richter:
Frustrated by the inability to do anything about the high cost of fuel or groceries and the egg-frying-on-the-sidewalk South Texas heat, let’s turn to something you and I have the ability to change for the better:
Making the San Antonio Express-News the most trusted, respected and accurate source [...]
One common criticism of blogs is their supposed lack of factual reporting and a proper system for corrections. But many blogs do impressive work in both areas. Here’s one example. Torontoist recently announced a new corrections system. It incorporates a corrections box within the post, as well as a good use of tags, comments and [...]
David Sullivan, who writes the That’s the Press, Baby blog, recently offered some good advice for copy editors:
We ran a story last week on a winner of the Medal of Honor. Like every good copy editor, I have been told for decades that it is a factual error to call it the Congressional Medal of [...]
In November of last year, I was invited to the Toronto Star by Kathy English, the paper’s public editor, to give a presentation to newsroom staff. The Star is Canada’s highest circulation daily, and one of very few* media outlets in the country with a full-time public editor/ombudsman.
Prior to my presentation, we sat down [...]
That’s a line from a blog post by Guardian subeditor (copy editor) David Marsh. It’s long been a common refrain from journalists, especially editors. In fact, Mitchell V. Charnley said basically the same thing in the introduction to his 1936 study of newspaper accuracy, the first of its kind.
“As common as the layman’s superficial generalization [...]
From journalism.co.uk:
The sourcing and fact checking process for stories on the BBC News website must be addressed by management, the BBC trust Editorial Standards Committee has recommended.
The committee made the suggestions as part of its response to a complaint about an article on the site, which pointed to inaccuracies in the report on Congressman Joseph [...]
Carol Goodhue, readers representative of the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote a recent column about how a correction to an error in William Kristol’s New York Times column didn’t make its way to her paper before publication. As a result, the Times has now changed the way it sends out corrections to subscribers of its [...]
January 23, 2008 – 8:00 am
In a recent column, Ted Vaden, public editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, calls errors “the low-grade virus of newspapers — always there, mostly benign, sometimes flaring up in maddening eruptions of inaccuracy.” Vaden offers space to a loyal reader who complains that the paper’s corrections don’t pass the “recycle bin” test, meaning “Don’t [...]
January 8, 2008 – 8:00 am
John McIntyre, the Baltimore Sun’s assistant managing editor for the copy desk, has written an excellent blog post about plagiarism and fabrication. McIntyre is the language and usage guru at the paper. He uses that knowledge base to offer up a list of ways to spot a plagiarist or fabulist. These should be provided to [...]
January 2, 2008 – 8:00 am
Kathy English, the public editor of the Toronto Star, wrote a recent column that reveals the paper’s corrections total for 2007. She also announced that the paper will have a corrections/errors database up and running in 2008. (See these 1,2 articles to learn about this kind of database.) English also wrote a November column about [...]
December 3, 2007 – 9:28 pm
After four-and-a-half months of re-reporting, long bouts of silence, and tangling with the US Army and various publications and bloggers, The New Republic today published a lengthy article by editor Franklin Foer that attempts to offer the magazine’s final word on the veracity of columns written by Scott Thomas Beauchamp, its Baghdad Diarist.
We’ll skip to [...]
December 3, 2007 – 8:00 am
Toronto Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski was inspired to write a column last week about newspaper errors after spotting this correction in the Toronto Star, a competing newspaper:
Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs 1939-1993 is 1,152 pages, which means that its price per page is 4.5 cents. An incorrect page count was given in a Nov. 25 comparison between [...]
November 16, 2007 – 8:00 am
Studies have shown that numerical errors are among the most common mistakes in newspapers and other types of media. Apart from reading books like this, this and this, British journalists out there should take advantage of an upcoming free workshop for the press being offered by the Royal Statistics Society. (Thanks to Adrian Monck, who [...]
November 1, 2007 – 8:00 am
CheckYourFacts.org has expanded on a previous report about the recently-launched New York Times corrections database. The new story offers more details about how the database works and how the paper will use it to track and improve accuracy. It also includes an interview with Greg Brock, the senior editor who oversees the database and the [...]
October 31, 2007 – 4:00 am
Philip B. Corbett, a deputy news editor at the New York Times, is the latest of the paper’s editors to offer himself up for a Q&A with readers. Corbett “is in charge of revisions in the newsroom’s style manual, and he handles questions from colleagues and readers about language and usage in The Times. He [...]
October 12, 2007 – 4:01 pm
The good folks at Check Your Facts recently published an item stating that the roll out of the New York Times internal corrections database is complete. The paper is now entering all of its corrections into a central database, much like how the Boston Globe, Rocky Mountain News and a few other US papers have [...]
One of the most enjoyable correction-related experiences comes at the end of every episode of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, a sports talk and interview show featuring Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser.
As ESPN explains, at the end of every show, “researcher Tony Reali corrects any statistical fouls Kornheiser and Wilbon made in the heat of battle.” [...]
