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 live [...]
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 wealth [...]
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 Times spoke [...]
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 the [...]
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 issues [...]
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 and [...]
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 corrections, [...]
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 the Financial [...]
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 some of [...]
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 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 [...]
