Carol Goodhue, readers representative of the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote a recent column about how a correction to an error in William Kristol’s New York Times column didn’t make its way to her paper before publication. As a result, the Times has now changed the way it sends out corrections to subscribers of its news service. From her column (found via Romenesko)
…This paper ran a William Kristol column from The New York Times on its editorial page March 18 repeating a claim that Sen. Barack Obama had attended services at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago on July 22, 2007, when the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. “blamed the ‘arrogance’ of the ‘United States of White America’ for much of the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.”
The day before that column appeared here, The New York Times had corrected it online, stating the Obama campaign had provided information showing that the senator did not attend services at Trinity that day. He was in Miami.
About two dozen readers contacted Opinion editors and me to ask why this paper had run the column anyway. Most didn’t note and perhaps didn’t know that the correction had appeared only online.
One reader declared the mistake “a major faux pas.” William E.J. Heffner called this “scandalously bad journalism,” adding, “I don’t know how anyone outside of a hermitage could be unaware of it.”
Incredible as this must seem to people who are perpetually tuned in to talk radio or wired to the Web, Union-Tribune editors didn’t know about that online correction. There’s not much time to patrol the Internet when you have deadlines to meet, and an editor who’s already copy edited a column isn’t likely to seek it out again.
I think the Times’ news service let us down here; it didn’t transmit a correction until 8 p.m. Tuesday, a day after it was posted online.
Clark Hoyt, the public editor at the Times, checked and found that editors have typically sent out corrections based on when they would be printed in the Times. “The process has been changed as a result of this Kristol error,” Hoyt said, “and corrections will be sent by the news service as soon as they are posted online. Another example of change in the new age of technology.”
Thanks to alert readers, Robert A. Kittle, editor of the Editorial page, and Bernie Jones, Opinion page editor, got in a correction on Page B9 on Wednesday. Hoyt thought it would run with the Kristol column in the Times today.
One Comment
This is not an error. Obama could have easily made it to the evening or early morning services. Jim Davis maintains his story, and so Kristol was not wrong.