The results of MediaBugs’ first survey of Bay Area media correction practices show that 21 out of 28 news sites examined — including many of the region’s leading daily newspapers and broadcast news outlets — provide no corrections link on their websites’ home pages and article pages. The websites for 17 of the 28 news organizations examined have no corrections policy or substantive corrections content at all.

Sites that do offer corrections-related content frequently make it relatively difficult to find: It is located two or three obscure clicks into the site, or requires visitors to use the site’s search function. Once located, the corrections content is, in most cases, poorly organized and not easily navigated.

As Rosenberg noted in an email to me, this isn’t exactly surprising. Online correction pages are still the exception, not the rule. The same is true for error reporting tools. The MediaBugs report offers some much needed proof that media organizations aren’t putting the proper amount of thought and effort into corrections. Here’s what Rosenberg wrote in a blog post for PBS MediaShift Idea Lab (where I’m an editor):

Fifteen years ago, in the early days of web publishing, it might have been understandable for editors to have a hard time figuring out how to handle corrections: This pliable medium was new and strange.

But news on the web is no longer in its infancy, and “We’re new to this” just doesn’t cut it anymore as an explanation for the kind of poor practices our MediaBugs survey documents. The explanations you generally hear are truthful but don’t excuse the problems: “Our content management system makes it too hard to do that” or “we just don’t have the resources to do that” or “we’ve been meaning to fix that for a while but never seem to get around to it.”

The web excels at connecting people. That’s what its technology is for. Yet when it comes to the most basic areas of accuracy and accountability, the professional newsrooms of the Bay Area (and so many other communities) continue to do a poor job of connecting with their own readers.

Rosenberg and I agree that it’s important to create a standardized error reporting function for the web. Something that every organization can implement in the same way. (He cited RSS as an example of how this kind of standardization can work.) I wrote about this idea in a recent column for Columbia Journalism Review:

Another example would be RSS. One way that it achieved mass adoption was by becoming standardized on major blogging platforms and then adopted by major Web sites. At the same time, the adoption of the RSS icon created a universal visual cue that helped drive understanding among Internet users.

Rosenberg is currently pondering the creation of something similar for “report an error” functionality. There are currently some large news Web sites that offer this—including the Toronto Star and Huffington Post (though theirs is hidden near the bottom of articles)—but it is by no means a standard. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and CNN, among many others, don’t include that option on their articles and pages. It’s such a simple, effective way to collect error reports, not to mention give readers a chance to participate and contribute.

But where it should be placed on the page? Do we need a universal icon? How about the interface that pops up after you click on that button? Should that be standardized? The fundamental idea is sound, but there are lots of details to work out. Rosenberg is thinking of the best way to move forward with the idea, and I’m hoping to help.

Who else wants to pitch in?

Here’s an excerpt of a recent blog post from Rosenberg:

One of the early field results of the MediaBugs experiment is a simple one. It turns out that, in the case of many news organizations, including some pretty prominent ones, just figuring out how to tell the newsroom that there’s a problem requires persistence and stamina.

Consider this anonymous error report we received at MediaBugs a few days ago. It said that the Wall Street Journal, in a recent book review, had misspelled the name of the author being reviewed. The book is Mac McClelland’s For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question. The Journal spelled her name “McLelland.” (The publisher’s page listing the book, which I’ll take as an authoritative source, spells it with the extra “c.”) …

Rosenberg then spends several paragraphs detailing the process he undertook to pursue this correction. Imagine how many people would have abandoned their quest for correction after the first few minutes of trying. (Most of them, if you ask me.) Writes Rosenberg:

I went to these lengths because, right now, this is my work. But we shouldn’t have any illusions about normal members of the public. They won’t jump through these hoops. They will conclude — rightly or wrongly but very understandably, either way — that the newsroom doesn’t actually care about hearing about its mistakes.

Now here’s the beginning of a new post from Follman:

Recently a MediaBugs user reported that an Associated Press story had misidentified the “Seinfeld” character George Costanza as Jerry’s “neighbor” on the show. Eventually the AP’s west coast entertainment editor, Steve Loeper, responded to an inquiry about the matter, and the AP subsequently decided to publish a correction.

It was a positive outcome, but here’s the rub: Getting to it involved no less than contacting five different people, sending eight emails and making three phone calls — and it took more than three weeks to get a result.

I suspect the MediaBugs team will continue to encounter this kind of disorganization and lack of accountability. As Rosenberg wrote, “If we want to understand why people don’t trust the media, this might be a very good place to start.”

It also helps explain why the number of published corrections is tiny when compared with the actual number of errors.

… My program scripts are combed through for most of Monday by a team of researchers. Even then, on several occasions our young web producer has spotted errors that somehow slipped through the net.

On the whole, the fact-checking system works pretty well. In a hundred-odd programs, we’ve made seven mistakes that we’re aware of – four of them, frankly, trivial. The three others resulted in on-air corrections as well as an acknowledgment of the error on our website.

In two of those, the problem was that the mistake wasn’t obvious. A good fact-checker has to look at a statement that looks right, and ask herself – could that be wrong?

For example, I said that public servant Godwin Grech denied on oath that he’d passed on the contents of an email to a reporter. Almost every journalist who was writing about the Grech affair made the same mistake, as did Malcolm Turnbull, multiple times. Media Watch didn’t think to check it on the day. Only afterwards did a viewer point out to us that most Senate committees, including the one at which Grech was giving evidence, don’t administer oaths.

On another occasion, we accused journalists of getting someone’s name wrong. They were using her second name, not her first. We should have thought to ask ourselves, “but does she prefer to use her second name?” We didn’t, but she did, and I got egg on my face.

All this is merely to say that complete accuracy is very difficult indeed to achieve. But my view has always been that up-front corrections and admissions of error increase the credibility of a publication, rather than diminishing it – so long, of course, as they are relatively rare (When I lived in Britain, The Guardian became so notorious for its frequent typos that Private Eye dubbed it ‘The Grauniad’. For those of us of a certain vintage, the name has stuck, irretrievably).

Last week’s Media Watch is a case in point. If Twitter is anything to go by – and I’m honestly not sure if it is or it isn’t – my ‘self-pwning’, as the Twitterati called it, went down a treat.

“Ha ha loved #mediawatch catches jonathon holmes,” (Name spelled wrong, @psychosophonist).

“Nicely self-pwned, @jonaholmesMW.” And many more.

My most celebrated predecessor, Stuart Littlemore, was notoriously reluctant to admit error. Even when the ABC’s Independent Complaints Review Panel found against the program, Littlemore contested the findings on-air. And he famously told the American media-watcher Steve Brill in 1997 that Media Watch had made no errors in the previous two years – a remark that prompted Brill to suggest that Littlemore might be the problem rather than the solution.

Of course, on-air corrections are anathema to broadcasters. Newspapers can bury them in small print, usually at the bottom left of page 2. But an on-air correction is in your face. In that respect, the internet has proved a blessing. Broadcasters like the ABC can put corrections on their webpage, and reckon they’ve done enough …

At Media Watch, we’ve been accused of being ‘the fun police’. I hope we’re not. I’m all for vigour and feistiness, humour and wit. But people shouldn’t be unfairly victimised for the amusement of others. And when the media makes mistakes, it should fess up – even without being forced to by lawyers or regulators.

When that happens, Media Watch won’t be needed any more. And pigs will fly.

“In this issue, for example, they checked approximately 9,000 facts, consulting 458 sources (including experts and people quoted) and corrected 312 factual errors”

For more on the value of fact checking, I suggest watching these videos of a speech given by Peter Canby of the New Yorker.

I gave my usual spiel about errors and corrections and all of the other topics I tend to cover. But one thing I don’t usually talk about is how I handle corrections on this website. (I often talk about corrections for the Regret the Error book.) While in Phoenix, a few students asked me about how I deal with corrections here. That set off a “blog post alert” in my mind. So here’s the resulting post — and some new corrections options.

In the Beginning

In the early days of this site, I would place a correction within the post itself and then repeat all of the week’s corrections in a round-up post. The weekly post was borrowed from Slate, and they continue to do this. I did the round-ups until late 2006 and then stopped. I honestly don’t remember why I stopped; but I definitely failed in that I should have explained clearly why I wasn’t going to do the weekly round-ups anymore.

The other thing I started doing from the beginning is credit people by first name when they spot a mistake made by me. I still do that.

Tagging

When I migrated the site from TypePad to WordPress in 2007,  I started using the “regret corrections” tag for all of my corrections. Not that I told you. I should have mentioned this in my post about the new site, but didn’t. That was a mistake.

It was also in 2007 that I started using the * to indicate corrections. The first post to use this method (which was again borrowed from Slate) was my year-end round-up for 2007. From then on, I placed a * at the end of any sentence that required a correction. Then I would place a correction at the bottom of the post and put another * there as well. (Just take a look at the posts listed under “regret corrections.”) The idea is readers can follow the *s to see exactly where the error occurred.

Moving Forward

So that’s where things have been up until today. I’m now announcing a couple of additions to help you track my screw-ups. The first is that any corrected post will have the word “Corrected” added to the headline, as was the case here. The second new element is a dedicated RSS feed for my corrections. Subscribe here. I’m also promoting this feed in the upper right hand corner of the site.

One other thing: Since launch, I have placed all of the corrections to my non-Regret work on this site. Since 2007, I’ve used the “craig’s correction” tag for these outside corrections. I will continue to post these on this site, and I’ll continue to use that tag. But now you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of these corrections. (This feed is also listed in the upper right.)

Do you have any other suggestions? Let me know in the comments.

Oh, and thanks ASU students!

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 of the amusing and apocryphal tales of checkers going far beyond the call of duty. For my research, I interviewed two fact checkers from the New Yorker, though only one spoke on the record. I had also approached Peter Canby, the head of the department and a senior editor at the magazine, for an interview. He politely declined.

Fortunately, we both delivered speeches at a recent fact checking conference in Germany, and I had the chance to speak with him. I also shot video of some of Canby’s interesting and amusing keynote speech. He began his talk by stating that it would be off the record, but I managed to get him to allow me to post a few excerpts. Three clips are below.

This one explains how they hire checkers, and the skills they look for:

Here’s some insight into what the magazine expects from its writers when it comes to fact checking:

Canby describes what he sees as the ultimate value of fact checking:

And so it was that I spent the last weekend of March in Hamburg in the offices of the famous German weekly magazine Der Spiegel as a speaker and participant in a conference dedicated to fact checking. I was of course at a disadvantage in that I was one of only four English-speaking presenters; the rest of the conference took place in German.

My fellow North American presenters were Peter Canby, a senior editor at the New Yorker who heads up its fact checking department; Sarah Smith, managing editor of the New York Times Magazine and a former fact checker at the New Yorker; and Scott Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication and the leading newspaper accuracy researcher working today.

Nearly all of us who spoke in English couldn’t help but note what a pleasure it was to participate in, wonder of wonders, a conference about fact checking. God bless those crazy Germans. None of us were willing to offer the checker’s guarantee that it was the first ever such gathering on record, but it was the only one we could think of.

The real news of the conference, at least for us visitors, was the massive fact checking operation at Der Spiegel. The other bit of news was that Der Spiegel has a wonderfully outrageous cafeteria and meeting space. You can view all my photos on Flickr, but here’s a sample:

Can you imagine eating there every day? Just looking at it makes me want to buy some shirts with butterfly collars, and grow a moustache. But back to fact checking…

My colleagues from the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker were just as amazed as me to discover the German weekly has roughly 70 full-time people in its fact checking and research department, as well as others who work part-time. By comparison, the New Yorker has 16 checkers, including Canby, making it the major checking operation one of the major checking operations by North American standards. [Update/Correction April 9: Canby emailed to say Vanity Fair has over 20 checkers, making it larger than the New Yorker's department. That's why I struck the text above.]  You can read all about Der Spiegel’s checking in my new column for Columbia Journalism Review.

This slide, which was part of a presentation by the head of the magazine’s checking and research department, illustrated that Der Spiegel’s approach is to hire checkers who have specific expertise in different areas. Here’s a list of some of their checkers (to give you an idea, their medical expert/checker is a former physician):

Though Der Spiegel’s approach is unique, there is one way in which German fact checking is similar to what we have (or used to have)  in Canada and the US: it’s on the decline. Very few publications — someone at the conference estimated there are six in all of Germany — practice it. The tough economic times have resulted in the reduction of staff checkers, and those that are left are looking for new ways to justify their existence.

During my discussion with a Der Spiegel fact checker and the deputy head of the department, they said they are trying to use their internal database of information and sources to generate topic pages for the website. You can view the Angela Merkel topic page here.

For them, one way to ensure the survival of fact checking is to offer something other than checking and research. In short, they’re trying to generate content, not just verify it. The department is also hoping to save time and resources by moving away from paper-based checking and towards a digital workflow. If you wonder what I mean by paper-based, take a look at this slide showing an article that was worked on by a checker (click for larger):

In terms of English-language content, I shot a bit of video of Scott Maier’s talk about newspaper accuracy. He shared some of his research into newspaper accuracy in the United States. (I have more about this research here and here.) Here’s an excerpt:

One quote from Maier that stood out for me: “In America, journalists are better educated than ever,  yet the rate of error is higher than ever. Something is going wrong.” Also, here are photos of some of the slides that were part of Maier’s presentation. These will give you a quick and dirty look at his new data about Italian and Swiss newspaper (which has not yet been published). Click for larger:

Finally, for any German speakers out there, here’s a lengthy TV report about fact checking and the conference:

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. Now, at last, a bit of history is being rewritten because of those memories.

After six months of research, The Associated Press this week is correcting the caption on one of the most famous photos in its library, 65 years after the image first moved on the newswire. The image shows defeated Allied soldiers after their surrender to Japanese forces on the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula in April 1942.

Over the years, the photo — which shows a procession of men walking down a dirt road, bearing bodies in blankets hung from bamboo poles — has become perhaps the most widely published image of what came to be known as the Bataan Death March.

But for many of those years, Love, a native of Albuquerque, N.M., who fought to defend Bataan as a 19-year-old Army corporal, saw captions paired with the photo that he believed did a disservice to the truth.

Last August, Love picked up the Albuquerque Journal and saw the photo again, together with a front-page story about Bataan survivors. He called the newspaper and told an editor the caption was wrong. It described the scene as part of the infamous Death March, a forced six-day march by Japanese captors of 12,000 Americans and more than 66,000 Filipino prisoners across the peninsula. Thousands died in the march, suffering from lack of food, water and medical treatment.

“That picture is not of the Death March,” says Love, now 87. “The Japanese would not have tolerated a bunch of slow marching guys carrying their own dead. They wouldn’t have tolerated it just one New York minute.”

A Journal reporter, Charles D. Brunt, found other local Bataan survivors who agreed, wrote a story about the conflicting information and contacted AP, the source of both the photo and the caption. That launched the cooperative’s own investigation of the photo, originally supplied to news services by the U.S. military after it was confiscated from defeated Japanese forces.

Deep in the AP library of millions of photos, the caption filed with a negative in 1945 identified the image as showing U.S. and Filipino forces carrying war casualties as they neared the end of the death march and approached Camp O’Donnell, where prisoners of war were held.

AP archivists contacted the Pentagon. Eventually, that led to the original photograph, on file in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The catalog recorded it as a photo of American prisoners using improvised litters to carry comrades. But a note filed along with the image, date unknown, said that, according to a retired U.S. Army colonel, the photo was not of the death march, but of the burial detail in the weeks that followed.

That’s exactly the way Love had long recalled it.

“We rounded up bamboo poles … and we confiscated what blankets we could from the incoming prisoners. We told them we had to have them. The guys were dying faster than we could dig graves or carry them,” Love said. “We carried them 1,000 yards and we would just unload the blankets there and the guys would fall out into the graves. I did that every day until the late hours of the evening for six weeks.”

After discussing the evidence, AP decided to correct the caption. It now reads, in part, “At the time of its release, this photo was identified as dead and wounded being carried by fellow prisoners during the Bataan Death March in April 1942 … Subsequent information from military archivists, the National Archives and Records Administration, and surviving prisoners, strongly suggests that this photo may actually depict a burial detail at Camp O’Donnell.”

It is rare for the news service to correct the information filed with a historical photo, said Valerie Komor, director of the AP Corporate Archives. There are many images in storage, and any individual photograph is likely to be re-examined only if someone calls it into question. But that does not mean the first draft of history cannot be rewritten …

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 the AD’s job at Dixie State College. A Tom Collins did apply for that job, but it was a different Tom Collins, not Tom Collins of BSU.
But just as much as this is an apology to Collins, this is an explanation. This is your newspaper, and the way we see it, you’re owed that at least.
Reporter Doug Zaleski had been chasing a rumor for about a week and a half that Collins was leaving. That’s when a source had originally told him that Collins had applied for the position at the school in St. George, Utah.
Now, understand that these sort of out-of-the-blue rumors aren’t uncommon to us. So as we often do in trying to flush out the validity of a rumor, Zaleski called the local newspaper, in this case, The Spectrum, which covers Dixie State. What, he wanted to know, was its sports staff hearing? If anything.
That practice, you should know, is commonplace. We, for instance, get calls all the time asking if we know anything about this rumor or that.
Anyway, The Spectrum didn’t know anything about Tom Collins and, indeed, first became aware of him thanks to us.
Still, our contact with other sources led us to believe there was reason to keep chasing the story. There was no real reason to call Collins himself, yet, but enough suspicion to forge on.
So we did, and in that regard Zaleski called Dixie State’s sports information department and asked specifically about Ball State’s Tom Collins. The response was that the school had no response. It would have saved us all a lot of grief had the school, then and there, denied that Tom Collins of Ball State was a candidate for its AD job.
But it didn’t and on Tuesday night, Zaleski received an e-mail from The Spectrum that it was publishing a story on Wednesday that Dixie State College was hiring Jason Boothe as its next athletic director. To go along with its story, The Spectrum had requested a list of finalists for the position to be included in its report. That list had four names on it, one of which was … Tom Collins.
As a result, The Spectrum told Zaleski late Tuesday night — about three minutes after our print deadline, actually — that it would be publishing a story on Wednesday listing those candidates, including Ball State’s Tom Collins.
We called Collins, but it was late, real late.
He didn’t answer, and we had to make a decision.
So with our backs against the deadline wall and knowing everything we had learned in a week and a half of trying to validate rumors, we reported what The Spectrum reported — that Collins was a finalist for the athletic director position at Dixie State College but did not get the job.
By midday Wednesday, it was clear a mistake had been made.
The list of finalists provided to The Spectrum did include names, but not school affiliations. We did not know that until Wednesday.
It boils down to this: After conversations between our two newspapers, The Spectrum made the assumption that the Tom Collins on its list was Ball State’s. And we made the assumption that The Spectrum had confirmed that.
That old saying about the word assume? It’s true.
We were all wrong. And because we were, we brought potential harm to Tom Collins.
The bottom line: We should have called Collins when we first heard the rumors. We should have taken more care with our reporting. We should not have allowed a lack of decision time to rush our decision.
Sure, in a world that has come to expect stories quicker than instantly, news is perishable, but that’s no excuse.
Please understand, the words we publish day in and day out, from top to bottom of this newspaper, are not written lightly. And Wednesday’s story was no different.
Neither is this apology to Tom Collins, nor this explanation to you.

Romenesko also had a link to the offending story.

Sunday’s column is something of a follow up. It also revealed that at the end of November the Post had published “about 950 corrections” this year. Alexander began by explaining that the Post often takes weeks or months to publish corrections:

The Post’s internal policies say that when readers point out mistakes, the response should be “prompt.” But too often, reporters and editors move at a snail’s pace to correct errors.

Despite improvement, an analysis of Post corrections this year showed that reported errors routinely went uncorrected for weeks or even months. Many were indisputable and should have been corrected in the following day’s paper.

In the Internet age, this kind of tardiness can be especially damaging. The longer inaccurate information lives on, the greater the risk that it will spread far beyond The Post’s readership. Dawdling on errors also weakens the bond of trust with readers who took the trouble to report them. They become justifiably cynical about The Post’s commitment to accuracy.

Alexander is on point with his criticism. Corrections should not take weeks or months to appear. He cited several examples where the paper dragged its feet. Even more interestingly, he provided a bit of an insider’s view as to how the paper’s corrections process is supposed to work:

Each month, corrections “monitors” in Post news departments are e-mailed a statistical analysis of pending and approved requests. It arrives with a standard admonishment: “It is very important that monitors handle correction requests in a timely fashion.”

Rather than emailing this to the appointed monitors once a month, why doesn’t the paper create an internal corrections-request tracking system that’s similar to software bug trackers? (I’m an unpaid advisor to MediaBugs, a Knight Foundation-funded project aiming to build something along these lines, albeit for public, rather than internal, use.) A system like this could provide automated alerts that make sure the monitors know when they’re falling behind. Also, the senior editorial people responsible for tracking corrections would be able to see which requests are still in the queue. An email once a month simply isn’t enough.

That said, a Post senior editor also raised a few other issues:

Senior Editor Milton Coleman said that an increased workload for editors, coupled with organizational changes and the temporary relocation of staffers during a months-long newsroom renovation, have caused “large gaps” in the corrections process.

But ultimately, he said, the remedy is that “someone has to be tasked with following up on a regular basis” to see that correction requests are being quickly handled.

These are valid problems, but there’s a larger point here: the Post’s internal corrections process isn’t scalable or adaptable. Some staffers get laid off, take buyouts or are reassigned, and the whole thing grinds to a near-halt. That’s not a good system.

Coleman told Alexander that’s he’s been tasked with helping improve the way things work. I suggest he step back from the micro-level issues and examine whether the paper could create a new, scalable process that enforces a higher level of accountability.

Crack the whip on people all you want, but I think the Post’s system/process, or lack thereof, is failing the paper.

Hoyt’s column offers new information, such as how five different editors reviewed her story and missed the mistakes. This is a classic example of how easy it is for mistakes to end up in print. It doesn’t matter how many people look at an article; they have to know what they’re supposed to be looking for.

The most interesting revelation in Hoyt’s piece was that, after attention was drawn to Stanley’s errors in 2005, the Times introduced a program to increase the fact checking of her work:

For all her skills as a critic, Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts. Her error rate dropped precipitously and stayed down after the editor was promoted and the arrangement was discontinued. Until the Cronkite errors, she was not even in the top 20 among reporters and editors most responsible for corrections this year. Now, she has jumped to No. 4 and will again get special editing attention.

The extra scrutiny helped. Then things regressed, and that’s the lesson here. The gap in the plan for “special editing attention” is that it doesn’t include a training component. Stanley could, with a little bit of effort, improve her level of accuracy. Additional oversight isn’t going to train her to be more accurate. It will make her more careful, but it won’t fix the source of the problem. Eventually she will stop receiving special attention and things will go back to the way they were.

It’s kind of a variation on the old “give a man a fish” saying: Give an error-prone reporter special editing attention and you’ll publish fewer of her errors. But train her how to be more accurate and she’ll make fewer errors. That’s a big difference.

I concluded my CJR column by writing that “whatever system [Stanley] has for checking her work isn’t sufficient. The same goes for how the copy desk is handling her articles. The Times can let her twist in the wind with errors like these, or realize this situation is hurting the organization and come up with a training program that helps her stop making simple factual errors at such an alarming rate.”

This is, as they say, a teachable moment. It’s an opportunity for the paper to create a newsroom-wide program that will help all reporters. After all, you can’t give everyone special editing attention. But you can teach good habits that prevent the need for special attention. Eliminate or at least reduce the errors at the source and suddenly there are less things that can slip through the cracks.

After my CJR column appeared online, I received an email from an editor asking me for some error-prevention advice. Here’s what I sent to him:

1. Self-Diagnose: Are you making or missing the same kinds of errors. Do you misspell names? Garble numbers? Etc. Take a month and track your mistakes. Write them down. Note how they happened and any other relevant information. At the end of the month, tally up your errors. Now you know your pain points. I recommend keeping an error journal; just create an Excel doc or Google Doc spreadsheet and keep track of your errors. This is hugely valuable data. (The Times has an internal errors database, so it already keeps some of this data.)

2. Create Good Habits: If you have a tendency to misspell names, then you need to start every interview by asking the person to spell their name. If, as an editor, you tend to overlook misspelled names, then the first thing you do with a new story is check the names. The key is to create habits/actions that are mapped to your mistakes. The best way to do this is to…

3. Use A Checklist: Whether you’re writing or editing, you should use a checklist to guide your fact checking process. I have a sample checklist available as a free download here. And if you need convincing, read this column about why checklists are so powerful.

I know one thing for sure: if Alessandra Stanley started using a checklist to review her work prior to sending it for editing, her level of accuracy would improve.

UPDATE August 3: Steven A. Smith has some good thoughts about this situation over on his blog. A sample:

Reporters with fact-error issues have to work a bit harder, have to develop personal double-checks that can be time-consuming and frustrating, especially on deadline. But that is the only way reporters can work themselves out of an accuracy funk. Some take on the challenge because of professional pride and a genuine desire to do their jobs as well as they can.

Others require a bigger stick. That’s just the truth of it.

I remember one reporter who worked on my regional staff at The Pioneer Press in St. Paul. He had experienced a terrible run of corrections, all the result of careless reporting practices. Working with him, we developed a series of steps he was urged to take before moving any story to his editors. Within days his desktop computer was covered in yellow sticky notes reminding him to check phone numbers and addresses, use the city directory, and so on. He took responsibility and his hard work produced results. His correction rate dropped dramatically and the new habits stuck with him.

But the reporter knew his job was on the line. ‘Fix it or lose it” was the message.

Was such a message delivered to Stanley at the time her editors developed a personalized editing program? If so, does the latest debacle mean she will lose her job? Should she lose her job?

Does “intellectual heft” in reporting compensate for inaccurate reporting?

The handbook is the guidance Reuters journalists live by — and we’re proud of it. Until now, it hasn’t been freely available to the public. In the early 1990s, a printed handbook was published and in 2006 the Reuters Foundation published a relatively short PDF online that gave some basic guidance to reporters. But it’s only now that we’re putting the full handbook online.

Several parts of the document address accuracy and corrections. Below are some of the more interesting parts.

Let’s start with "The 10 Absolutes of Reuters Journalism":

• Always hold accuracy sacrosanct
• Always correct an error openly
• Always strive for balance and freedom from bias
• Always reveal a conflict of interest to a manager
• Always respect privileged information
• Always protect their sources from the authorities
• Always guard against putting their opinion in a news story
• Never fabricate or plagiarise
• Never alter a still or moving image beyond the requirements of normal image enhancement
• Never pay for a story and never accept a bribe Link

Accuracy

The handbook has an entire sub-section devoted to accuracy. It offers guidance on dealing with sources, quotes, datelines and reporting rumors, amoung other topics. Here are a few of the "accuracy is" or "accuracy means" paragraphs:

Accuracy entails honesty in sourcing. Our reputation for that accuracy, and for freedom from bias, rests on the credibility of our sources. A Reuters journalist or camera is always the best source on a witnessed event. A named source is always preferable to an unnamed source. We should never deliberately mislead in our sourcing, quote a source saying one thing on the record and something contradictory on background, or cite sources in the plural when we have only one…

Accuracy means that our images and stories must reflect reality. It can be tempting for journalists to “hype” or sensationalise material, skewing the reality of the situation or misleading the reader or viewer into assumptions and impressions that are wrong and potentially harmful. A “flood” of immigrants, for example, may in reality be a relatively small number of people just as a “surge” in a stock price may be a quite modest rise. Stopping to think, and to discuss, how we use words leads to more precise journalism and also minimises the potential for harm. Similarly, no actions in visual journalism should be taken that add to or detract from the reality of images. In some circumstances, this may constitute fabrication and can cause serious damage to our reputation. Such actions may lead to disciplinary measures, including dismissal…

Accuracy is paramount in our use of datelines and bylines. Readers assume that the byline shows the writer was at the dateline. We should byline stories only from datelines where the writer (or the reporter being written up on a desk) was present. We may only use datelines where we have staff or freelancers on the spot from text, photos or TV and we are getting information from them on the ground. Reporters or freelancers who have contributed to a report should be included in an additional reporting line at the end of the story, giving their name and location…

Accuracy means proper attribution to the source of material that is not ours, whether in a story, a photograph or moving images. Our customers and the public rely on us to be honest about where material has originated. It allows them to assess the reliability…

As you can see, accuracy is a lot of things. Here’s some advice for dealing with sources:

• Cross-check information wherever possible. Two or more sources are better than one. In assessing information from unnamed sources, weigh the source’s track record, position and motive. Use your common sense. If it sounds wrong, check further.
• When doing initiative reporting, try to disprove as well as prove your story.
• Accuracy always comes first. It’s better to be late than wrong. Before pushing the button, think how you would withstand a challenge or a denial.
• Know your sources well. Consider carefully if the person you are communicating with is an imposter. Sources can provide information by whatever means available – telephone, in person, email, instant messaging, text message. But be aware that any communication can be interfered with.

Corrections & Erorrs

Reuters is transparent about errors. We rectify them promptly and clearly, whether in a story, a caption, a graphic or a script. We do not disguise or bury corrections in subsequent leads or stories. Our Corrections Policy is outlined in this Handbook. Link

The corrections policy contains a lot of technical information that’s specific to Reuters. However, the Handbook does include some good tips for avoiding errors. Some selected advice: 

• Confirm the day of the week and the date.
• Check all the numbers – do all the components add up to the total, do individual percentages add up to 100? Double check the period covered, conversions, whether the figure is up or down. Watch for confusion between millions and billions, misplaced decimal points, transposed conversions. Check share prices.
• Watch the spelling of proper names and ensure names are spelled consistently throughout the story.
  
• Ensure the story gives full company names, full and proper titles, and RICs in both the text and header field. Check that unfamiliar RICs and web site addresses mentioned in the story actually work.
  
• Check for legal dangers and balance. Does the story cast a slur on the good name of an individual, company or organisation? Does it expose anyone to ridicule, hatred or contempt? Is the story balanced and fair? Link

Dealing With Hoaxes

One section provides a bit of guidance related to hoaxes:

Do a reality check. Does this information fit within the bounds of what was expected? Any wild divergences are a clue you may be viewing information in the wrong context. Link

But here’s the best part — a guide to not getting fooled:

• Regard all information you receive by telephone as suspect unless you know the caller. If you do not know the caller, ask for the person’s full name, title and telephone number. Rather than take it for granted that the name and number are authentic, check such details independently though an organisation’s or company’s switchboard, online searches and other journalistic means.
• Telephone the person back. Get confirmation that it was indeed that person who telephoned you.
• Use the same precautions with unsolicited material received by e-mail, fax, instant message, other electronic means, SMS or in the mail.
• Be on guard against April Fool hoaxes on or around April 1 and all fantasies such as the birth of five-legged sheep, human pregnancies lasting 18 months, the marriage of 100-year-old sweethearts, perfect bridge hands and miracles.
• Follow the checking procedure even if it means delaying a story until you are sure of its accuracy.
• Use nothing found on the Internet, even from what appears to be a genuine corporate or institutional site, that is not sourced in a way that you can verify. Many corporate announcements and much economic data are now released online. Reporters need to be familiar with how news sources in their areas of expertise distribute information. Be suspicious of online information that is a complete surprise or appears in an unexpected place. Ask yourself if this is how an organisation normally delivers news? If in doubt confirm information by telephone or other means before you publish it. Capture, save and print a copy of a “screenshot” of the web page in question in order to defend us against charges of printing nonexistent information. If you do not know how to capture a screenshot, ask anyone with a technical bent to show you how.
• We have no greater protection if we pick up a hoax from a newspaper, a broadcaster or any other third party news organisation. The damage to our reputation from running a hoax is the same and in many jurisdictions we are just as liable under the law. Link

Using Online Sources

Here’s what the handbook says about Wikipedia:

Online information sources which rely on collaborative, voluntary and often anonymous contributions need to be handled with care. Wikipedia, the online "people’s encyclopedia", can be a good starting point for research, but it should not be used as an attributable source. Do not quote from it or copy from it. The information it contains has not been validated and can change from second to second as contributors add or remove material. Move on to official websites or other sources that are worthy of attribution. Do not link to Wikipedia or similar collaborative encyclopedia sites as a source of background information on any topic. More suitable sites can almost always be found, and indeed are often flagged at the bottom of Wikipedia entries. It is only acceptable to link to an entry on Wikipedia or similar sites when the entry or website itself is the subject of a news story. Link

All in all, the Handbook contains a wealth of information about errors and corrections. Most useful are the tips for avoiding reporting errors and the guide to not getting fooled by hoaxes. There are also two pieces of timeless advice:

…try to disprove as well as prove your story.

And:

Accuracy always comes first. It’s better to be late than wrong.

When the Sentinel tightened its financial belt back in June, it lost a wealth of seasoned veterans, many of them editors. Those journalists not only wrote headlines and captions. They also scrutinized the work of reporters — correcting spelling, straightening out syntax, double-checking facts — before publication.
With fewer people to do that now, less of that important work gets done, and the result is more published errors.

Yesterday, the ombudsman of the Washington Post wrote basically the same column:

…Growing numbers of readers are contacting the ombudsman to complain about typos and small errors.

"As a virtually lifelong subscriber, I am disheartened by the increasingly poor quality of the editing of The Post," wrote Richard Murphy of Alexandria. If typos can’t be caught by a spell-checker, "then The Post should restore a couple of copy editor positions. You have cut that staff too much."

The Post’s copy editors are among the best I’ve worked with during nearly four decades in the newspaper business. But they’ve been badly depleted by staff cuts as the money-losing paper struggles to control costs. Those who remain are stretched thin while The Post expands to a 24-hour news operation in print and online.

Between early 2005 and mid-2008, the number of full-time copy editors dropped from about 75 to 43 through buyouts or voluntary departures. It has declined further since then, but Post managers won’t provide precise figures beyond saying that six took a recent buyout offer. The need is so critical that most are being hired back on contract through at least the end of the year, and part-timers are taking up some of the slack.

Copy editors are the unsung heroes of newsrooms. Unknown to the public, and often underappreciated by their colleagues, they’re the last line of defense against a correction or, worse, a libel suit…

"By definition, you’ll see more errors when there’s reduced staffing," said Bill Walsh, the A-section copy desk chief. On a typical weeknight a few years ago, Walsh said, the three copy desks handling national, foreign and business news could rely on perhaps 20 editors. Those desks have since been combined into one desk, headed by Walsh. Today, he said, "there are some shifts where I’m looking at seven or eight people total."…

These papers are by no means the only ones experiencing a spike in errors due to the loss of bodies on the copy desk. Adding to the problem is the fact that the move online means papers are churning out more content than ever before. Yet copy editors — and magazine fact checkers — are being shown the door.

Carl Sessions Stepp examined how some newsrooms are coping with this challenge is his recent article, "The Quality-Control Quandary,” It’s a must-read. I fear, though, that few organizations are rethinking their quality control process and means of verification. They’re just trying to do more with less. It’s a recipe for disaster.

I looked at this issue in a recent essay I wrote for Harvard’s Niemen Neiman Reports:

For more than 100 years, one of the most recognizable slogans in journalism has been “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Lately, The New York Times motto is being challenged by the familiar phrase, “do more with less.” This new saying was, in fact, the theme of the World Editors Forum scheduled for March, but the event had to be cancelled “due to the impact of the global financial downturn on newspaper companies.”

News organizations are shedding employees. Those that remain are expected to pick up the slack and also push ahead with digital initiatives. Included in the exodus are valuable copyeditors—the people in whose encyclopedic brains reside a lot of what prevents errors from surfacing in stories. The few, the proud—and disappearing—magazine fact checkers are also being told to grab their World Almanacs and Book of Facts and move along.

Accuracy is a huge journalistic challenge. When reporters are asked to take on more work while the newsroom’s same fallible processes and error-prone technologies remain in place, the result will undoubtedly be a further downward slide in quality. More errors will be followed by more apologies and more corrections. And this is happening at a critical time for journalism—a time when consumers are being asked by journalists using digital media to lend support to their newsgathering mission…

One of the videos features the editor of PolitiFact offering some good, basic advice about fact checking. 

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 up, publishing a story to explain the error:

…Executive Editor John Solomon said The Times published the story in its print edition without a photo, then editors sent it to the Web platform without an attached photo.
He said The Times’ automated “news themes” engine, constructed to match related content to the Web site, paired the Associated Press photo of the Obama daughters to the bylined story. An online editor later spotted the photo and added a short caption.
“That editor should have removed the photo from the site but did not recognize the inappropriate mismatching,” Mr. Solomon said. “As soon as we learned about the problem, we detached the photo from the story. We regret that this technical glitch led to an inappropriate pairing of the photo with the story and we’ve taken steps technologically and in our editorial process to try to avoid such an episode in the future.”
“We also hope this glitch does not distract from the important and well reported subject of the story: the crisis of school violence in one of the nation’s largest cities.”

The lede of the above story blamed the error on a “technical glitch.” Well, that’s partly true. But this error also occurred because of a lack of editorial oversight. The photo was automatically matched with the story, but someone should have approved it before the article went live. So, yes, a technical glitch. But also a process problem. Solomon seems to acknowledge this when he says that “we’ve taken steps technologically and in our editorial process to try to avoid such an episode in the future.”

Solomon also reacted to the incident by sending a memo to staff. It ostensibly reinforces the importance of accuracy, but I worry that it could result in Times staffers doing more to conceal mistakes. Here’s a relevant passage:

1. Any reporter or editor who makes an error in a story that requires a published correction must submit a letter to the Executive Editor and Managing Editor explaining the mistake and what corrective actions were taken. These letters will be placed in your permanent personnel file.

This sends the message to the newsroom that it’s better to conceal an error than correct it. I know that’s not what Solomon meant to say, but his policy will encourage some staffers to do everything they can to hide a mistake. After all, leaving an error uncorrected means they won’t have to own up to it in an embarrassing letter — a letter that will go in their personnel file.

Solomon is right to want to track errors and understand their cause. But his process is all about punishment and shame; it’s not about learning from mistakes. These letters of confession go into a person’s personnel file. Sure, that provides information for their annual review. But what about the organization as a whole? This information should be collected in a corrections database that helps the newsroom track and understand the most common causes of error. Don’t shame your staff with a high school-esque process that’s all about letters and permanent records. It will only make people want to hide their errors. That’s bad for the newsroom and bad for readers.

The third item in Solomon’s memo addresses the issue of training. I like that the paper is introducing an accuracy training program. But he’s presented it like a remedial class for bad reporters and editors:

All reporters who have had stories with published corrections in the last year and any editors who inserted errors into copy will be required to take a mandatory class on accuracy and precision to be held the first week of June and led by Carleton Bryant.

Clearly, being put in that class is a form of punishment. Ideally, it would be a badge of honor. All staffers should receive accuracy training to help prevent mistakes. They should also be encouraged to own up to their mistakes and share any personal tips for attaining accuracy.

The Times needs to adjust its accuracy plan. Make it about working together to attain a higher standard, rather than singling out staff members for punishment. Make it about learning from mistakes, rather than embarrassing people. Make prevention and correction a part of the paper’s culture.

A culture of shame and blame just makes people scared to get things wrong. It doesn’t help solve the problem.