Last week Arthur Brisbane, the new public editor of the New York Times, posted an illuminating exchange between a reader of the paper and one of its top editors. The reader asked: What’s with the way stories change all the time on the website? “How does the newspaper of record handle this? I read something, [...]
“One time, there was somebody giving what I call the gift-wrapped scoop to one of my friendly rivals at a broadsheet paper. and I said, ‘Look, I was on that story and you gave it to them. Here’s what i’m going to do. Every story from now on, every cockamamie rumor that comes out of [...]
Tuesday marked the 30th anniversary of the day these words appeared on a front page of the Sunday Washington Post: "Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms. "He nestles in [...]
Dean Miller, director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, says news consumers should pay attention to what he calls "the APCs" to determine the validity of an online source of news. That stands for Authority, Point of View and Currency e.g., whether the site has recent information and the links are [...]
When I make a mistake, I do it front of 67,000 subscribers and many of them are happy to point out the error of my ways. So today, by popular demand: A correction. Castle Gate is very near the town of Helper. It is nowhere near the town of Heber. I said Castle Gate was [...]
Another example is the decline of trust. In the mid-1970s over 70% of Americans told Gallup they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the press. Today: 47%. Clearly, something isn’t working. But revisions to the code of conduct that has led to this decline would be seen by most journalists as [...]
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 the core information: The results of MediaBugs’ first survey of Bay Area media correction practices show [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
