Below is my annual, depressing list of 2010's incidents of journalistic plagiarism. Also note that this year I argued that news organizations should use plagiarism detection services, examined why they don't and also offered a guide to sniffing out plagiarism. Please email me if I’ve missed any incidents. January None! February The Merced Sun-Star published [...]
While you’re here, please consider purchasing a copy of the Regret the Error book, which won an award for media criticism from the National Press Club, and also contains hundreds of hilarious corrections. You can learn more about the book and read some reviews here. The paperback edition includes a new introduction. Error of the [...]
After a few months of working together and lining up some partners, Scott Rosenberg of of MediaBugs and I today launched the Report an Error Alliance. This initiative aims to move news organizations of all shapes and sizes towards a common standard for online error reporting. The goal is to ensure more mistakes get corrected, [...]
Some of the best web journalists around gather on Twitter every Wednesday at 8 ET for #wjchat. As the @wjchat Twitter bio explains: #wjchat is a chat for web journalists on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. PDT. We talk about all things content, technology, ethics, & business of journalism on the web. You can look at [...]
While at the Online News Association conference in Washington a couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to spend some time with my friend David Cohn. David is one of my favorite people in journalism. He's the founder of Spot.Us, the excellent crowdfunded journalism platform, and we first met several years ago when we [...]
The New York Times reports that Theodore C. Sorensen, "a close adviser and counselor to John F. Kennedy for 11 years," died today at the age of 82. But the paper's otherwise interesting and comprehensive obit omits one noteworthy detail. Sorensen is famous for his work with Kennedy, but he also earned a legendary place [...]
Just a quick note to say I'm at the Online News Association Conference currently getting underway in Washington, D.C. If you're a reader of the site, please make sure to say hello in person. (This is what I look like.) And on a related note, I won't be posting new content tomorrow. -Craig Report an [...]
Ah, earnings season. CFOs reach for their lucky pen, belt, shoes or other good luck charm. Investor relations teams prepare to highlight the good and mitigate the bad. And if you listen closely, you can hear conference call lines being initiated all over the country. Reporting on corporate earnings leaves a journalist open to committing [...]
Mike Wise wasn’t. Earlier this week, the Washington Post sports columnist decided to tweet a fabricated claim that Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be given a five game suspension by the NFL. Wise later said the erroneous tweet was his way of showing that “anybody will print anything.” Well, he proved that people would [...]
… The challenge is to find a way to quickly and accurately sort and evaluate a mass of incoming reports according to your preferences. This is a core element of distributed verification, which I called “the best way to engineer trust in today’s information environment” in a previous column about WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan documents. This is [...]
Talking Points Memo has dubbed it “The Mother Of Bogus Corrections.” After setting off outrage that drove the news cycle for days and caused the firing of an official, this is what Andrew Breitbart added as a correction on his post with the now-infamous Shirley Sherrod video: Correction: While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured [...]
Slate published an interesting article by Jeremy Singer-Vine about “What the politics Web site [Politico] deletes from its articles without telling anyone.” From the piece: … How often does Politico, in the din of the news cycle, make significant changes to its copy after publishing it—without telling readers? Part of the answer, of course, depends [...]
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 [...]
Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander continues to beaver away on the corrections beat. (See some of his previous work here.) Yesterday’s column looked at the paper’s less than effective process for enabling readers to report errors: … Many readers have also complained that the Web site doesn’t offer an effortless way to report journalistic errors. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
One of my pet concepts is that we should be pushing out corrections, rather than requiring readers to go hunting for them. Pushing out corrections means offering them via RSS or email, placing them within a listing of the latest news and articles, and finding ways to make corrections more prominent, and more a part [...]
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 [...]
I’m traveling over the next couple of weeks, and will be speaking at a German conference about fact-checking. Regular posting will resume April 5. In the meantime, feel free to send along any notable corrections and errors. Thanks! Report an error
Columbia Journalism Review today released a major report about magazine websites. (Disclosure: I write a weekly column for CJR, but had no involvement in this report.) You can read a brief intro and download the full PDF here. The report includes some interesting information about fact checking, copy editing and corrections. The results are mixed, [...]
First, a bit of news: I launched a Regret the Error Facebook page yesterday. It aggregates posts from the site, the What I’m Reading Links over to the right, and my weekly columns for Columbia Journalism Review. Of course, it’s also a place for discussion and sharing links. Go here to check it out and [...]
The folks at the NYTPicker, a blog that reports on the New York Times, took special notice of the corrections page in today’s paper. It is worth highlighting, as the Time published 36 corrections. (I recently profiled the NYTPicker for PBS MediaShift.) Sunday is the biggest day for Times corrections. It’s when the paper corrects [...]
While you’re here, please consider purchasing a copy of the Regret the Error book, which won an award for media criticism from the National Press Club, and also contains hundreds of hilarious corrections. You can learn more about the book and read some reviews here. The paperback edition, which includes a new introduction, came out [...]
It’s a depressing job, but somebody’s got to do it. Below is my annual round-up of the year in plagiarism and fabrication. The good news is that there were fewer incidents than in 2008. Please email me if I’ve missed anything. January None! February New York Daily News reporter Rosemary Black stole two paragraphs and [...]
