September 23, 2008 – 8:00 am
A passage from Jesse Froehling’s story (spotted by Romenesko) in the Sept. 17 edition of Seattle Weekly brought back memories:
Mark Powell finds mistakes everywhere he looks. National monuments, scholarly texts, museums, The Washington Post, The New York Times: All have drawn the attention of Powell’s rabid, error-spotting eye. Powell will leave you seven-minute voicemails about [...]
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 [...]
The Torontoist blog has an interesting story about a man, a would-be burglar, and a series of remarkable photos. Plus, a little bit of copyright infringement.
In July of last year, Joel Charlebois, a Toronto resident, caught a man trying to break into his home. While trying to escape, the man fell from a second floor [...]
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 [...]
Earlier this morning, a story on the New York Daily News’ website reported that New York Rangers forward Sean Avery “was rushed to a Manhattan hospital Wednesday morning in cardiac arrest just hours after his team’s playoff loss.” The story also reported that Avery was “unconscious and not breathing.”
The information was attributed to “sources” — [...]
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 [...]
Today was a historic day for newspaper apologies. A sad, shameful, embarrassingly historic day.
Two UK papers controlled by the same owner (Express Newspapers) issued front page apologies to a British couple, Kate and Gerry McCann. The apologies will be repeated in the related Sunday editions of both papers, the Sunday Express and Daily Star Sunday*.
In [...]
January 24, 2008 – 7:59 am
Attention Montreal readers: I’m giving a free lunchtime talk about press errors, corrections and accuracy at the Atwater Library (1200 Atwater) on January 30 at 12:30 p.m. I’ll be sharing some information from my book and this site. Please come by. Here are the details:
Regretting Errors: The History And Current State of Media Accuracy, Errors, [...]
January 3, 2008 – 9:10 am
Public Eye, a blog launched by CBS News in September 2005 with the stated goal of bringing “transparency to the editorial operations of CBS News — transparency that is unprecedented for broadcast and online journalism,” died this week due to the lack of “a sustainable business model.” It was roughly 28 months old.
CBS Interactive cut [...]
December 24, 2007 – 8:00 am
Regret the Error will be taking a break from December 24 to January 1. Come back for fresh content on Jan. 2. In the meantime, feel free to send along any notable corrections or errors. I’ll post them on Jan. 2.
December 11, 2007 – 6:01 am
Written and compiled by Craig Silverman
Trends of Note
Obama Errors
Barack Obama appears to be a magnet for press errors.
He was mistaken for “Osama” in two (1,2) news reports by CNN, and in one by the New York Post. Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle once referred to him as a Republican, and the Hartford Courant has misspelled his [...]
December 11, 2007 – 6:00 am
This is the least enjoyable part of running this site, but we suppose somebody’s got to do it. Herewith, a month-by-month report of instances of plagiarism and fabrication in the press. Of particular note is the high number of incidents of plagiarism at student newspapers this year. A disturbing trend, to be sure.
January
A columnist and [...]
December 3, 2007 – 9:28 pm
After four-and-a-half months of re-reporting, long bouts of silence, and tangling with the US Army and various publications and bloggers, The New Republic today published a lengthy article by editor Franklin Foer that attempts to offer the magazine’s final word on the veracity of columns written by Scott Thomas Beauchamp, its Baghdad Diarist.
We’ll skip to [...]
November 15, 2007 – 8:00 am
Bruce Schneier, one of the leading thinkers in IT security, recently wrote a column for Wired.com in which he uses the example of corrupt NBA referee Tim Donaghy to examine systems that suffer from single points of failure. The same concept directly relates to journalism and accuracy.
What sorts of systems — IT, financial, NBA [...]
November 2, 2007 – 8:00 am
Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, writes and consults for The Guardian, and also teaches journalism at CUNY, was gracious enough to write the foreword for the Regret the Error book. He has posted an excerpt of his excellent contribution on his blog. Below is an excerpt of the excerpt, but you should go read [...]
October 30, 2007 – 5:00 am
Information that can’t be trusted is not less valuable; it’s worthless.
Those words were written by Orlando Sentinel public editor Manning Pynn in an important column published on Sunday. (Romenesko spotted it.)
Pynn was moved to write the column after noticing a spike in the number of corrections over recent months. “In the past [...]
October 28, 2007 – 12:52 pm
Welcome to the new website. Note that the images in the older posts are currently not loading automatically. You just need to click on the link with the image name and it will load. I’m working to fix this. Also be sure to check out the brand new book section of this site. You can [...]
October 24, 2007 – 8:00 am
Background here and here.
TVNewser acquired the memo that ABC News head David Westin sent to staff about the findings of the internal investigation into the work of Alexis Debat, a former consultant with the network. Some relevant excerpts:
…This review was extremely sensitive, as it required going back to confidential sources in this country and abroad. [...]
October 23, 2007 – 8:00 am
Equals a marriage made in heaven as far as we’re concerned.
On Sunday’s edition of Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, the wonderful news quiz show that airs on NPR, Stephen Colbert was brought on to do the Not My Job segment. To our joy, the program decided to quiz him about media errors, and it used [...]
October 12, 2007 – 4:01 pm
The good folks at Check Your Facts recently published an item stating that the roll out of the New York Times internal corrections database is complete. The paper is now entering all of its corrections into a central database, much like how the Boston Globe, Rocky Mountain News and a few other US papers have [...]
September 25, 2007 – 11:47 am
Earlier this morning, we received word via email that Claude Jean Bertrand, professor emeritus at the University of Paris II, died on September 21. As the message noted, “He promoted the concept of Media Ethics, Accountably Systems and Deontology in foundations of democracy, the world over.”
Bertrand was a pioneer in devising the concept of a [...]
April 12, 2007 – 10:00 am
After many blogs (Gawker, TV Newser etc.) put out calls for the name of the CBS producer fired this week for plagiarism, David Blum has named her in a story in today’s New York Sun. “In an era when plagiarists get dismissed and outed weekly by their employers at news organizations around the country, the [...]
