While we’ve had loose guidelines around this procedure for years, we’re going to need to formalize them, and then continue to evolve them. We’ll share what we come up with in updates to this post, and welcome your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below.One question to get the discussion going: How much do you trust pictures you see in social media, or derived from there on Web sites? Are you cautious about believing captions? And does your level of trust vary between established news sites like msnbc.com and other places where you come across cell phone pictures purporting to show breaking news events?

– via Photoblog – Is this a picture of the Discovery gunman today? We don’t know..

The above refers to the ethics of posting photos from social media during breaking news events. Good to see MSNBC.com open this topic up for discussion and input — and nice to see them use such a non-declarative headline for the post. A worthy discussion.

Thanks, @bydanielvictor!

That doesn’t come close to capturing the nature of Breitbart’s transgressions. And it’s pretty rich considering Breitbart’s Big Journalism site has made a regular feature of demanding that other media outlets issue corrections.

Thanks, snuh!

So were these changes updates or corrections? And, in either case, why didn’t the site acknowledge the changing nature of its articles? The New York Times, for example, requires its continuous news desk to note when articles have been updated. And adding corrections for factual errors is a broad standard in the industry. So is Politico inserting new information without noting it, or is it also deleting errors without adding in corrections? [Be sure to scroll down to read my latest updates to this piece.]

Slate certainly made it seem as though scrubbing is an issue at the website. And then, close to three hours after the Slate piece went live, a correction was added at the top of the piece:

Correction, 6:45 p.m.: Shortly after we published this piece about Politico’s unacknowledged corrections, Politico contacted us to tell us that it had acknowledged almost all these corrections. (Politico appended the corrections after we asked about them but before we published our story.) To see our corrections of our mistakes about their corrections—still with us?—click here.

That’s a notable development considering the response that Politico’s top editor had when first contacted by Slate:

Editor-in-Chief John Harris said: “I’m not sure there needs to be a black-and-white policy.” But Politico “ought to think about” keeping a running list of corrections, and its unwritten policy. Politico’s unwritten policy is to append notices to articles “where something substantive was not correct,” Harris said. In many of the stories cited in the sidebar, Harris acknowledged, “there was no thought or judgment applied.

The fact that most of the problematic Politico articles noted by Slate were corrected after Politico was notified of the changes suggests that the site could indeed benefit from a “black-and-white-policy.” Honestly, though, shouldn’t a good policy be black-and-white, meaning clear? Isn’t that kind of the idea behind creating a policy?

It seems Politico has not been operating with a proper corrections policy, let alone decent procedures. (An unwritten policy is usually no policy at all.) As a result, articles were being changed, facts were being corrected — and nobody was telling readers. Bottom line: scrubbing is unethical and unprofessional. It breaks the contract of correction that has existed between journalists and the public for hundreds of years. If that’s too old school for you, Politico also violated Jeff Jarvis’ newer maxim of “publish and correct.”

Politico needs to get its corrections act together. Scott Rosenberg has also weighed in with a call for “versioning” — a similar approach to how software is updated — as a way to deal with the evolution of news stories on the web. It’s a good suggestion, and I know of one person who is already using this as a way to communicate updates and corrections. As a starting point, Politico needs to draft a clear policy, create the necessary related procedures, educate staff, and implement any necessary technical measures to enable corrections.

Let’s hope this Slate study provides Politico with the motivation to get it done with the kind of speed that the site is so famous for.

UPDATE July 21, 12:00 pm: It’s important to note that the Slate story has resulted in a rather suprising admission by the publication. This was added as an update to its story:

As Politico’s editors also pointed out to us, many of the changes Politico made to its stories would have been permitted under Slate’s own corrections policy. Under Slate’s policy, we do not notify readers about minor corrections that we ourselves catch within 24 hours of publication.

Well, that’s interesting. Hypocritical, too… This is the first I’ve heard of the Slate policy and they should change it. Twenty-four hours is a long time online, and the proper policy is to fix errors and correct them, regardless of time frame. I’m curious as to what is and isn’t a “minor correction” in Slate’s definition, but it seems to me that a factual error or typo that changes the meaning of a sentence should be noted whether you catch it 10 minutes or 10 hours after publication. The idea is to be transparent with your readers. This policy may help editors save time, and writers save face, but it does nothing for readers.

Slate does a lot of things well with their corrections, and I often cite them as an example of a publication that has a good online corrections format. But this is a bad policy and they should change it. There’s a certain sense of karmic justice, though, that Slate’s takedown of Politico has had the unintended effect of shining a light on a misguided Slate policy.

UPDATE July 21, 12:25 pm: Here’s a statement from Tim Grieve, deputy managing editor of Politico:

Slate has now posted no fewer than six separate corrections to its story and the accompanying sidebar, and we’re still pushing them to correct at least one more significant factual error.

They’ve admitted they were wrong about the number of stories on which we posted corrections; they’ve admitted they were wrong about the substance of one of those corrections; they’ve admitted they were wrong on a number of specific stories where they said we hadn’t posted corrections when we had; and they’ve admitted that they misquoted a WRITTEN statement I provided to them. They also mischaracterized comments made by POLITICO’s editor-in-chief; we’re still trying to get them to own up to that one.

Their story now begins with a 50-word correction and ends with a 125-word correction, and the sidebar is studded with doozies like this: “Correction, July 20, 2010: A previous version of this article incorrectly reported that Politico hadn’t yet acknowledged its correction.”

We all make mistakes, of course, and Slate caught us making some: We’ve managed to correct some stories on our site without posting the formal correction notices that our policy requires. We’ve gone back and added correction notices to all of the factual corrections Slate identified, and we’re taking steps to prevent this problem from recurring.

In the meantime, Slate now admits that it doesn’t even try to live up to the standard it would hold us to. I’m not sure if that’s irony or hypocrisy, but either way it probably should have given Slate pause before going on the attack.

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?

Thanks, Brett!

The article has been fixed, though no correction was added.

Thanks, Andrew!