We regret the inadvertent publication of the article titled “Shia-Sunni reconciliation” by Saleem Ali in our print edition of December 9, 2011 and subsequently on our website.
The article was published without exercising proper editorial judgment. We apologise for the mistake and to our readers whose religious sentiments were hurt. We will not be taking any more articles from this writer. The article has been removed from the website Link

The same apology appeared on Pakistan News Today. Here’s where the offending article originally appeared. It’s now a 404 page, though Google news has this excerpt:

For example, Maulana Ishaq’s sermons on Shia-Sunni unity (given in Urdu), which have hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube, are heartening. They discourage Shias from hurling abuse but also admonish Sunnis from being emotional about respect and …

I contacted Saleem Ali, the author, for additional details and he said he objects to the removal of the piece. Ali is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont. From his email reply to me:

This was a case of being bullied by some religious zealots who kept calling any criticism of ritual “hate speech.”
While some language was insensitive and i apologized for that — it was by no means “hate speech.” I dont approve of their decision to remove but can understand it in Pakistan’s tough media environment.
You will note the comments under the retraction that majority of readers did not think it should be removed.
I reposted the article on my blog — with an image to show the kind of ritual I was criticizing and also a preface with context and apology for the particular word usage.

He offered additional detail on his blog, writing that the piece “was a test of free speech in Pakistan and it is clear that the country is still stuck in a time warp of religious hypersensitivity.” Also from his post (emphasis his):

In the rush to write we can all be sometimes negligent and I recognize that the choice of words in describing some of the rituals was insensitive but certainly not hateful. To show due respect and in a spirit of amity I have removed the language which described the state of the mourners in the procession as “high on testosterone” (and God knows what else).” In retrospect this was indeed an inappropriate statement and I apologize unconditionally for use of that statement.

Ali told me via email that “this became an issue of personal safety as well.” He said he was subject to verbal attacks on Twitter, had his Wikipedia page vandalized, and that some people wrote letters to the president of his university to try to get Ali fired.

“The university of course realized that these accusations were baseless and actually offered me police protection (not that I need it in Vermont!),” he said. “However, given the high rates of kidnappings of writers in Pakistan such bullying and defamation is a serious issue. I have family in Pakistan and this has caused us sleepless nights for the past few days.”

Update Deceber 13, 2011: Ali also wrote about the incident for the website of Foreign Policy.

In fact, his body wasn’t found until a couple of days later. The Mail story said Mulrooney had been found in the River Lee. In reality, he was found in a yard belonging to a business. The paper also hinted at suicide, but that doesn’t appear to have been a factor.

What an outrageous, unconscionable mess.

As as result of the false report, the president of the school’s student union sent a letter to the paper demanding an apology. And the Student council banned sales of the paper on campus. Now that an apology has been published, the ban will be revisited when the council meets int he new year. A report from IrishCentral.com:

The motion to ban ‘the Mail’ was passed after students promised to seek some measure of reprisal for the tabloid having deliberately invented the story in a callous and calculated bid to merely sell more copies.
An apology was printed in the newspaper yesterday, and a marketing manager for the paper’s parent company said that the editor had personally travelled to Cork to meet with members of Caolan’s family to express his sorrow at the pieces publication.

Here’s the apology, via the University Times:

A newspaper story dutifully crossing its “T’s” and dotting its “I’s” can be a powerful tool in a community, a force for tremendous good. When it gets key facts wrong, however, it can inflict tremendous harm.
In the case of one Tuesday story (“Sexual harassment case filed against Dad’s Bar-B-Que”), The Anniston Star got a major fact wrong. It incorrectly reported that the owner of Dad’s Bar-B-Que also owns the Top o’ the River restaurant. That is wrong. The owner of Anniston’s Top o’ the River is in no way affiliated with the restaurant that is currently the subject of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit.
The Star regrets the error and apologizes to Top o’ the River, its ownership and employees for this mistake.
The Star misinterpreted a state database of business ownership. The fault lies not with the database but with us. Once alerted to the error Tuesday morning, The Star amended its online version and began a twofold process: (a.) of digging into how this mistake occurred and (b.) of taking steps to ensure it is not repeated.
Errors of this magnitude happen occasionally at The Star, just as they do at most other newspapers. That does nothing to lessen the pain, regret and unpleasantness that accompany them; the mood in the newsroom Tuesday was decidedly downcast.
The newspaper is fully dedicated to delivering the news important to its community in a fair, honest and accurate manner. One such vital method is to report our errors and make corrections. Another way is to learn from our mistakes. Rest assured, we remain committed to earning the public’s trust daily.

John Pittman, executive editor Link

Here’s the offending story, via Jim Romenesko’s new and interesting website:

The uncorrected, offending story is still online.

This offers an opportunity for me to explain how we handled the situation. I’m not saying we did it perfectly. I’d be eager to hear comments from readers about anything we may have overlooked or handled poorly.

As a starting point, here’s the text of the apology that was published:

Around 2:45 p.m. today, we published a story about Jericho Upshaw, a Halifax man charged with first-degree murder, and his association with the North End.

It relied on two sources who said they had encountered him in the neighbourhood on several occasions. Unfortunately, the story was wrong: we had the wrong Jericho. The details in the story were about another young man with the same first name. Our two sources had seen Upshaw’s photo in a local paper and identified him as the man they had encountered in the North End. They were mistaken, and we were wrong in publishing the story.

Within about five minutes of posting the story online and sending out a tweet about it, we realized we had the wrong Jericho. We removed the story from our site and deleted the related tweet.

Our practice is to not unpublish content. We don’t want to erase the record; we prefer to correct it.

But in this case, the story was based on a mistaken identification by two sources. It was built on the information from those two sources. As a result, we felt it was essential to remove the story and publish this explanation of what went wrong. We also redirected the URL from the mistaken story to this blog post in order to ensure that anyone who finds that piece of content will understand why it was removed.

On behalf of OpenFile Halifax, I apologize for this error and will do everything I can to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

Neal Ozano
Editor, OpenFile Halifax

This is the kind of situation we journalists dread.

“My heart sank,” said OpenFile editor in chief Kathy Vey in an email to me today. “Neal had asked me to look over the story for legal issues, because it was a murder case. There weren’t any but we had a much more basic problem. We named the wrong guy.”

The story was based on totally incorrect information. It shouldn’t have been published. So what do you do now that you know that? I hate unpublishing content; it should only be done in very specific circumstances. In my view, this was one of them.

The story itself was completely incorrect. Once we knew we had the wrong person, there was nothing left in the piece that offered value to readers. So it had to come down — and we had to replace it with something as soon as possible.

I worked with Halifax editor Neal Ozano and editor in chief Kathy Vey to draft the apology. We also contacted our tech team to alert them that we would need to redirect the URL of the unpublished story to the new blog post. That way, anyone who found their way to the offending story would be given an explanation of what what happened, of why the story was gone. Sending people to an error page is not acceptable. You have to make it easy for them to understand what happened.

The apology itself also needed to be clear about what the mistake was, how it occurred and what action we took once we realized our error. Again: help people understand what went wrong. Be clear. We also had to be honest about the fact that it was a failure on our part. You can’t just blame your sources. It was published on our site. We needed to accept responsibility and offer a clear apology.

A final consideration was the fact that our OpenFile Halifax Twitter account tweeted a link to the story. So as soon as the post was live and URL redirect was working, we tweeted the link to the apology from the same local Twitter account. That was then retweeted by me, Kathy Vey and by our national OpenFile Twitter account. Our Toronto news curator also retweeted it of his own accord. We wanted to make sure Twitter followers had a chance to see the apology.

As of today, the apology is still on the homepage of our Halifax site. (It will probably scroll off by the end of day.)

Now the job is to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We cover local news in our cities, but we don’t do a lot of crime reporting. So the story was a bit out of our comfort zone and area of expertise. We will be extra cautious with any stories of this nature in the future. We’ll also ask ourselves whether what we have is really news. We will add extra eyes to contentious stories.

What else should we do? What could we have done better? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This apology attracted a bit of coverage in the U.K. press, as the Leveson inquiry is ongoing and generating lots of news. It’s also, you now, a false accusation. The offending Guardian piece by Marina Hyde was harsh in characterizing what that false accusation said about the Sun:

Hyde accused the Sun of “blowing a giant raspberry at Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry or perhaps casually defecating on his lordship’s desk while doing a thumbs-up sign”.

The Press Gazette detailed how the objection from the Sun was raised at the inquiry. Here’s how the Guardian responded during the proceedings:

The Guardian’s director of editorial legal services Gill Phillips confirmed the paper had received a “strongly worded complaint” from The Sun which it had investigated this morning.

She told Lord Justice Leveson: “My instructions are that the story about The Sun is incorrect and we will publishing an appropriate correction and apology which will go up on the rolling online corrections columns as soon as agreed and will be lead correction in print tomorrow.

“We will also remove the offending two paragraph in the sketch from the online version.”

She added: “We would also like to apologise to the inquiry for this having had to take up their time this morning.”