As a way of enticing you to head over to the new blog, I today published the 2011 edition of the Year in Media Errors and Corrections, my annual roundup of the best of the worst in journalistic error. Go over and read it, and let me know what you think!

I’ve been working on my annual roundup of The Year in Media Errors and Corrections and have a bunch of candidates in mind. We’ll share the current finalists during the chat, and I hope folks will share others I may have overlooked.

Come have your say, and chat about some of the best of the worst. I’ll even share a few choice corrections!

David W. Dunlap was brought back to the memory of that first Times byline thanks to a recent interview about WKCR. He subsequently wrote a post for the Times City Room blog about his memory of that first story, and how it relates to recent news at the station. His post included a scan of the original 1981 story. As a result of that old story being resurfaced, Dunlap learned that he’d made two errors in his story. So he blogged about those, too:

Bad enough to discover, on revisiting the article, that I’d misstated the cross street at which the tower was situated. (I said it was 54th Street.)

Then came this e-mail: “I was Googling WKCR and found this article below. I had no idea that I was a part of your first article and that James Gleick was your editor! It was fun to know this after so many years. Michael Silberstein. P.S. It’s Silberstein, not Silverstein.”

Goes to show that it’s never too late for a reader — or long lost source — to help you fix some errors.

The common problem with fact-checking is a misplaced reverence for “expertise” as a substitute for hard-nosed reporting and independent evaluation. So here are a few friendly suggestions for better fact-checking: Reporters do not represent the establishment, they should be suspicious of it; politicians who seem reasonable may not be; politicians who depart from the Washington consensus may be saying something important. If you think you can even get to the truth of a complex, contentious issue with a couple of phone calls, you are kidding yourself and your readers. And don’t invent a “truth” where the truth is genuinely in dispute.

— via “How to Fix Fact-Checking”, a post on Forbes by John McQuaid. It comes in response to a recent piece by Mark Hemingway in the Weekly Standard, “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking’”.

An excerpt from the Standard piece, which had the subhead “The liberal media’s latest attempt to control the discourse”:

The media establishment has largely rallied round the self-satisfied consensus that fact checking is a noble pursuit. Nonetheless there are signs of an impending crack-up. In their rush to hop on the fact-checking bandwagon, the media appear to have given little thought to what their new obsession says about how well or poorly they perform their jobs.

It’s impossible for the media to fact check without rendering judgment on their own failures. Seeing the words “fact check” in a headline plants the idea in the reader’s mind that it’s something out of the ordinary for journalists to check facts. Shouldn’t that be an everyday part of their jobs that goes without saying? And if they aren’t normally checking facts, what exactly is it that they’re doing?

As such, fact checking frequently involves one news organization publicly accusing competing organizations of malpractice. Instead of newsroom watercooler kvetching and burying subtle digs in the eleventh paragraph, friendly fire is breaking out into the open.

An article about the investigation into the abduction and death of Milly Dowler (News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone during police hunt, 5 July, page 1) stated that voicemail “messages were deleted by [NoW] journalists in the first few days after Milly’s disappearance in order to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive.” Since this story was published new evidence – as reported in the Guardian of 10 December – has led the Metropolitan police to believe that this was unlikely to have been correct and that while the News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone the newspaper is unlikely to have been responsible for the deletion of a set of voicemails from the phone that caused her parents to have false hopes that she was alive, according to a Metropolitan police statement made to the Leveson inquiry on 12 December.

Even with the correction appended, one of the subheads on the story still reads, “Deleted voicemails gave family false hope”. That seems to implicate the NoW. The Guardian has been criticized for this routine correction to a major allegation. Storyful has a look at some reaction from former NoW journalists.

Writing in the Independent, Stephen Glover offered this assessment:

Some people might think The Guardian owes us a more comprehensive apology than a brief posting at the top of an online article published five months ago. But the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, does not like apologising since to do so would suggest that, even though he inhabits the upper reaches of Mount Olympus, he is made of flesh and blood like the rest of us. He did carry a story in Saturday’s paper under the headline “Police logs raise questions over the deletion of Dowler voicemails”, but it did not contain the blunt admission of error conveyed by the posting, far less an apology. Ironically, it was co-written by Nick Davies, one of the co-authors of the 4 July article.

Thanks, Norman!

The headline is I’ve joined the Poynter Institute as a member of its adjunct faculty, and this blog will be moving to Poynter.org. This is the culmination of a discussion between Poynter and me that started back in August.

I’m tremendously excited about this because, for the first time, it means I can spend the majority of my time writing for Regret the Error (and the other great blogs at Poynter.org), while also developing training programs focused on accuracy and verification, and contributing in other ways to the Institute’s work. I’ll continue to focus on accuracy, errors, verification, misinformation, and related topics such as transparency and accountability in the press.

One of the frustrations I’ve had with running this site is it’s never been more than a sideline. My day job has always been elsewhere, meaning I couldn’t jump on news quickly, or devote time to longer, reported pieces. I’ll now be able to do that, and a lot more, too. One of the best parts? The vast majority of the work I produce is going to be available free of charge. And that work will be produced in conjunction with the great and knowledgeable people at Poynter.

In terms of the nuts and bolts, my agreement with Poynter means this site’s archives will be imported into Poynter.org for the duration of our relationship. (This initial agreement runs until the end of 2012.) That change, and the redirection of the URL, will happen in the new year. But as of Monday, December 19, all new Regret the Error posts will be found at Poynter.org/category/latest-news/regret-the-error/. My RSS feed will move there as of the 19th, so no need to reset your subscription.

Apart from that, I will continue to be involved with OpenFile, the Canadian online news startup I helped launch in 2010. I am shifting to an editorial advisory role from my current position. I advise another Canadian news startup, Spundge. It’s in private beta and is building tools to enable journalists to discover and manage real-time news and information. I help with product development as the company’s journalist in residence. I also write a weekly column for the Toronto Star. (It highlights the week’s most notable media mistake.)

I will continue to disclose these relationships when writing or commenting about related topics or issues, and I will work to avoid any conflicts of interest. I will always err on the side of disclosure.

Finally, I want to thank all of you who have read this site over the years, and those of you who send in corrections and errors. I value your contributions and attention, and my promise is that these changes will provide you with the best content you’ve ever seen on this blog.