The Pew Research Center released a report yesterday that provides an overview of the public’s attitude towards the press from 1985 to 2011. When it comes to accuracy and issues of credibility, there’s a lot to digest. Mostly, it’s bad news. From the report: Negative opinions about the performance of news organizations now equal or [...]
This post, “There’s No Problem!’ Newsrooms in Denial About Rampant Errors,” from MediaBugs executive director Scott Rosenberg is in reply to this post from Jonathan Stray. Together, they encompass much of the information you need to get a good understanding of newspaper accuracy and some of the failures of correction. So not just worth reading [...]
Asking your users to report inaccuracies strikes me as a fabulous idea, and likely very productive see: “someone is wrong on the internet!“ I have no knowledge of the quantity of errors submitted using these forms, or how the corrections process works. My suspicion is that each submitted correction sends an email to some hapless [...]
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 [...]
Today’s edition of my weekly column in Columbia Journalism Review looks at the issue of speed versus accuracy in journalism. I hope you’ll take a moment and read it, as it relates to this post. Think of the column and post as branches on the same tree. My column looks at the issue in terms [...]
In case you hadn’t noticed, I recently added a “What I’m Reading” sidebar to the site. It’s over there to the right. I link to relevant articles that I find interesting or of note. And now, every once in a while, I’ll post a round-up of some of those links to make sure you don’t [...]
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 [...]
