Thanks for being a regular reader. You can check out the award-winning Regret the Error book here.Scott Rosenberg and Mark Follman of MediaBugs released a new report this week that highlights some corrections-related problems with Bay Area news outlets. (I’m an unpaid advisor to the project, but didn’t have any involvement with the report.) Here’s [...]
I previously wrote about MediaBugs, a Knight Foundation-funded project that I’m occasionally helping out as an unpaid advisor. It’s been up and running for a few weeks and the people running it — Scott Rosenberg and Mark Follman — are coming to grips with the challenge of finding the right person to listen to a [...]
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation airs a regular program called Media Watch. I’ve highlighted the show’s work in the past — this was a particularly notable report — and a recent opinion piece by the show’s host is of interest. (Also see this related piece from the show.) Among other details, it offers information about how [...]
The Canadian Magazines blog took note of the editor’s letter in a recent issue of Reader’s Digest Canada. That’s because editor-in-chief Robert Goyette took time to lay out some numbers that communicate the value of the magazine’s fact checking department: “In this issue, for example, they checked approximately 9,000 facts, consulting 458 sources (including experts [...]
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 [...]
Few things in the world of magazines are the subject of as much lore as the New Yorker’s fact checking department. Many marvel over the magazine’s pedantic process for checking the facts in every article, caption, cartoon, poem and work of fiction. I dedicated a chapter of my book to fact checking, and recounted many [...]
If you were to indulge in a bit of stereotyping and imagine the country most likely to host a conference about the pedantic discipline of fact checking, you’d probably arrive on one likely location: Germany. And so it was that I spent the last weekend of March in Hamburg in the offices of the famous [...]
This is a nice story from AP about how the news organization worked hard to correct a photo caption on an important photo: For 68 years, John E. Love has been haunted by memories of being forced to carry the bodies of fallen comrades to a mass grave hollowed out of a Filipino rice field. [...]
Below is a front page article from the Star Press in Muncie, IN: We screwed up. And to Tom Collins, we’re sorry. What was reported on this newspaper’s sports pages yesterday and on our Web site for much of the day on Wednesday was wrong. Collins, athletic director at Ball State, did not apply for [...]
December 8, 2009 – 8:00 am
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 [...]
August 2, 2009 – 12:35 pm
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has weighed in on the paper’s recent, error-riddled story about Walter Cronkite. The story, written by television critic Alessandra Stanley, resulted in two corrections, one of which was for seven mistakes. I wrote about the mistakes, and Stanley’s history of error, in a recent column for Columbia Journalism [...]
Reuters has made its internal Handbook for Journalists available to the public via the Internet. It posted the full document online and Dean Wright, Reuters’ global editor of ethics, innovation and news standards, wrote about it yesterday. (Romenesko spotted Wright’s post.) Here’s what Wright says about the Handbook: The handbook is the guidance Reuters journalists [...]
Just over two years ago, the public editor of the Orlando Sentinel wrote a column alerting readers to the fact that the paper had experienced a spike in the number of corrections. He was clear about the cause of the increased errors: When the Sentinel tightened its financial belt back in June, it lost a [...]
YouTube recently unveiled its Reporters’ Center, a library of videos offering advice about a variety of aspects of journalism. "The YouTube Reporters’ Center is a new resource to help you learn more about how to report the news," according to the site. "It features some of the nation’s top journalists and news organizations sharing instructional [...]
The Washington Times made an embarrassing mistake on its website last week. This picture pretty much speaks for itself: Yes, those are the Obama kids. No, they weren’t involved in the story. After being spotted by one blog, the image quickly spread. Some people said it was an example of the Times’ right-wing bias. The [...]
It’s amazing what the subtraction of one letter can do. For example, misplace an “l”* and you report on the “pubic presidency” instead of the public one. Or “pubic schools.” It’s a common typo, and the Irish Times recently published an amusing essay about the dreaded dropped “l”: IT HAPPENED yet again yesterday. This time [...]
March 13, 2009 – 10:43 am
Allan Britnell, a Canadian freelance writer and fact-checker, has written an article suggesting that magazines should make a point of telling readers about their dedication to fact checking. Writing for Masthead Online, a website that reports on the Canadian magazine industry, Britnell proposes “an industry-wide campaign to promote fact checking” to readers: One of the [...]
Rhonda Roland Shearer and her team at Stinky Journalism do a great job digging into the story behind some big stories. They recently posted a look at the media reports about the crash of Continental Flight 3407 in Buffalo, New York. It worth a read. Here’s an excerpt: Were the pilots, captain Marvin D. Renslow [...]
Matt Thompson, a fellow the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, wrote an interesting post about corrections for his Newsless blog. He notes the limitations of the online corrections pages of some newspaper websites, and also calls for a new way of pushing corrections out to readers: We could do much more with [...]
February 27, 2009 – 8:00 am
During a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Tucker Carlson emphasized the importance of accurate reporting. Some of his favourable comments about the New York Times elicited boos and catcalls from the audience, but his point was that conservative news organizations need to emphasize accuracy and newsgathering. Portfolio’s Jeff Bercovici found the video, which [...]
February 11, 2009 – 10:36 pm
This was published on the National Post’s NP Editors blog this evening: Today, a Financial Post reporter responded unprofessionally to another Twitter user on his personal Twitter account. While the remarks were made on the reporter’s personal Twitter account, the conversation first began when the reporter was acting in his capacity as a reporter for [...]
February 6, 2009 – 8:00 am
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller participated in an online Q&A with the public this week. Some of his answers touched on accuracy, credibility and corrections. Here’s one relevant exchange: Q. You’ve been the face of The Times through the very roughest times for The Times. Anything you regret? — C.D. Monroe, Washington … [...]
November 28, 2008 – 11:10 am
The Guardian’s Media Monkey blog got its hands on an all-staff email sent by Daily Telegraph associate editor Simon Heffer. He berates the staff for making too many mistakes, and for not adhering to the paper’s style guide. An excerpt: Dear Colleagues I have exhorted you all to read carefully what you write. I think [...]
November 27, 2008 – 8:00 am
Derek Donovan, the readers’ representative of the Kansas City Star, yesterday took the unusual step of writing a blog post that invited readers to offer suggestions about the wording for a correction he was working on. From his post: As I’ve written before, it’s The Star’s policy not to restate an error in a correction [...]
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 [...]
