Tag Archives: columbia journalism review

New CJR column: Mike Wise, #Discovery and a tale of two Twitters

September 3, 2010 – 1:23 pm

Thanks for being a regular reader. You can check out the award-winning Regret the Error book here.

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 pass along information if it comes from a reputable sports reporter, and that said sports writer will face a storm of criticism, admit on the radio that his gambit was a “stupid, irresponsible” idea, and be suspended for one month by his employer. A fantastic experiment, that one.

In the end, all Wise illustrated was that the credibility he has built up was easy to undermine. Here’s part of the apology he issued at the start of his radio program this week:

I didn’t put ‘kidding‘ in that sentence. I didn’t put ‘just joking.’ I could even say I thought I corrected it within five minutes and didn’t realize my Twitter server was busy 30 to 40 minutes later. But the truth is that if I waited one second to make my intentions and sourcing clear, I waited too long.

Wise’s transgression was even more notable because it occurred in the same city and featured the same supposedly unreliable platform as another event this week. When combined, they provide a tale of two Twitters and a case study of the disruptive nature of new media platforms. The new openness breeds a certain amount of chaos and unpredictability.Wise seems to long for the old, closed world of media where the gatekeepers stood watch and the audience stayed silent. But when a gunman took hostages at the headquarters of the Discovery Channel this week, the news broke on Twitter. Along with the live feed of TBD TV, it was one of the best places to follow breaking news about the standoff …

via Wise Up : CJR, my latest column for Columbia Journalism Review.

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My latest CJR column: the Challenge of Verifying Crowdsourced Information

August 30, 2010 – 8:00 am

… 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 where SwiftRiver comes in. I got in touch with Jon Gosier, a co-founder of SwiftRiver and the CEO of African software consultancy Appfrica, to talk about the project.

“The big motivation behind SwiftRiver, to be quite frank, was to solve two problems Ushahidi was having,” he told me by e-mail. “One, how to verify crowd sourced information, and two, how to filter realtime streams of data when it became overwhelming, without sacrificing the integrity of the stream. In other words, how can you speed up the process of vetting information from Twitter, RSS feeds, SMS and email.”

via The Challenge of Verifying Crowdsourced Information : CJR. I've been delinquent in posting links to my CJR columns. But the most recent ones are listed in the sidebar to the right.

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A correction to call my own

April 28, 2010 – 10:47 am

This is a correction to my most recent column for Columbia Journalism Review:

Correction: An earlier version of this column misspelled Craig Kanalley’s last name as Kanally.

It’s pretty clear to me why I misspelled Craig’s last name: I didn’t use my checklist when doing a final read of this column. Lesson learned.

Go here to learn about how I handle my corrections. You can also subscribe to a feed of my corrections in the upper right hand corner of the site.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Online | Also tagged , | View Comments

CJR report highlights how magazine websites handle online corrections, fact checking

March 1, 2010 – 3:10 pm

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, if not altogether negative in these areas.

Here’s a notable section (emphasis theirs):

Is online content, with its rapid turnaround requirement, held to the same standards as material that appears in print? In general, the answer is no. Over half (51%) of original content that appears on Web sites is either not copy-edited at all, or is copy-edited less rigorously than in print. Moreover, just under half (43%) of respondents say that there is either a lower standard for fact-checking online (35%) or no fact-checking at all (8%).

Web sites are more likely to have lower standards in these areas as their traffic rises, and when content decisions are made by independent Web editors.

These bullet points are also of note:

• Fact checking (excluding blogs) is less rigorous online than in print.
• Web sites with more than 50,000 visitors a month fact-check less rigorously than sites with less traffic.
• Fact-checking is more likely to be lax when independent Web editors are in charge of online content decisions.
• Many magazines Web sites correct errors without acknowledging the mistakes.
• Error correction rises with Web traffic and profitability, but methods of doing so are inconsistent.
• Error corrections rise when independent Web editors make content decisions, but independent Web editors are more likely than print counterparts or publishers to correct with no notice.

The report has some additional detail (below), but those are the headlines. Some thoughts:

  • Scrubbing is rampant. The vast majority of magazine websites are not publishing corrections for “typos or misspellings.” Also note that the report refers to these as “minor errors.” Well, not all typos and misspellings are equal. Yes, a typo that doesn’t change the meaning or reader’s understanding of a sentence (or introduce a factual error) can be fixed without requiring a correction. But what if a typo results in you reporting that Queen Elizabeth “lays up to 2,000 eggs per day”? Would they scrub that, too? We don’t really know. But once you are in the habit of scrubbing, it’s easy to start disappearing factual errors, which is unethical.
  • Fact checking is seen as a “nice to have” for online magazine content. It’s been relegated to luxury status. Within magazines, print and online are seen very differently, with print viewed as the place to invest in fact checking and copy editing.
  • One thing the report doesn’t make clear is what it means by fact checking. People who fact check for a living often say there’s no such thing as partial or “less rigorous” fact checking. Either check all of the facts, or don’t call it fact checking. So it would be useful to know how these respondents defined fact checking. Are professional fact checkers reviewing the online content? Or is an editor told to, for example, check the names and numbers before publication? It’s possible what respondents refer to as fact checking is, in fact, not in any way related to what traditional magazine fact checking looks like.

More fact checking data from the report:

Fact-checking (excluding blogs) is less rigorous online than in print for 35%
of respondents (Fig. 19).
• 8% do not fact-check print or online content.
• 8% do not fact-check online-only content.
• 27% say online-only content is fact-checked, but less rigorously than print
content.
• 57% use the same fact-checking process for online-only and print content.
In total, 84% of magazines surveyed do at least some fact-checking of their online-
only content and 92% fact-check their print content.
Figure 19: Fact-checking
Which best describes how online-only content is fact-checked?

More about corrections:

Many magazines Web sites correct errors without acknowledging the
mistakes (Fig. 23).
• 87% correct minor errors, such as typos or misspellings, with no indication to readers.
• 45% correct factual errors with no indication to readers.
• 37% correct factual errors and append an editor’s note detailing the nature of the error to the content where the mistake appeared.
• 6% leave major factual errors in as they originally appeared in the content, but add an editor’s note at the point of the error.
• 1% note all errors in a special section of the Web site.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Magazines, Online, Regret Articles | Also tagged , , , | View Comments

A correction to call my own

February 19, 2010 – 6:14 pm

This correction was appended the the latest edition of my weekly column for Columbia Journalism Review:

The original version of this column stated the Daily Beast used iThenticate to check Gerald Posner’s articles for plagiarism. Robert Creutz says he is unaware of the specific nature of the material the Beast was checking with the service. The lead has be changed to reflect this. A quote from him also suggested he had contacted the Beast to recommend they move to the subscription option, but Creutz says he was speaking in general and did not make a recommendation. The quote has been corrected. Finally, Associated Content was cited as an iThenticate customer. Creutz says his references to Associated Content were in the context of noting that the company is similar to Demand Media. He did not mean to imply that they were a customer. We regret the errors.

My book corrections are here. My most recent previous correction is online here.

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CJR Column: Comedy of errors

March 20, 2009 – 1:39 pm

cjrThis week’s Regret the Error column on Columbia Journalism Review online looks at two media errors that became fodder for late night comedy. Excerpt below. Click on the headline for the full column.

Comedy of Errors

Jay Leno has made amusing, mistaken, and otherwise notable newspaper headlines a staple of his show. Recently, his rivals got into the media mistake act. This could either be a disconcerting example of kicking newspapers when they’re down, or perhaps it’s late night comedy’s way of reminding people that newspapers are still relevant. Either way, it’s been an amusing few weeks.
Last week comic Andy Kindler appeared on Late Show with David Letterman. Kindler, an occasional correspondent for the show, makes a habit of calling out other comedians and the industry as a whole during his annual “State of the Industry” address at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal.
I interviewed him a couple of years ago and listened to him launch bombs at Larry the Cable Guy, Wayne Brady, and Will Ferrell for his role in Blades of Glory. “I love Will Ferrell, but I don’t want to see Will Ferrell holding up the guy from Napoleon Dynamite while on skates,” he said.
Of particular note is the fact that Kindler had nothing but nice words for Letterman when we spoke. But that didn’t appear to be the case when he was interviewed by a fellow Montreal journalist just a couple of months ago. The Gazette of Montreal quoted Kindler as saying, “Bottom line is that Letterman is unwatchable now.”
As soon as he took his seat next to Letterman, Kindler began explaining that he had been misquoted. Letterman even pitched in by holding up a copy of the article in question…

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CJR column: The NYT policy for correcting older articles

March 13, 2009 – 12:48 pm

cjrMy CJR online column for this week uses a very delayed correction from the New York Times to examine the paper’s policy for correcting its archives. An excerpt is below. Click the headline for the full text.

Everything Old Is New Again

During The New York Times’s 4 p.m. news meeting on Tuesday, a gathering that draws top editors from the paper, the culture editor described a story for the next day’s paper that included a connection to a Times article from over a century ago
The current article reported about a secret inscription rumored to have been added to a watch belonging to Abraham Lincoln. On Tuesday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History revealed that it had opened the watch and confirmed the presence of the hidden message.
“Basically, as an aside, the culture editor said: ‘Interestingly, the Times wrote an article on the jeweler [who made the engraving] in 1906 in which he discussed the inscription. But it turns out he had it wrong’,” says Greg Brock, a Times senior editor and the person in charge of the paper’s corrections.
The assembled editors shared a chuckle about the mistake from roughly a century ago. Brock, however, immediately locked eyes with Craig Whitney, the paper’s standards editor and his boss. “We both kind of raised our eyebrows as if to say. ‘Hmm, maybe we should…’,” he says.
They did. On Wednesday, the paper published a correction to the erroneous article from 1906 …

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CJR column: Welcome to the fourth wave of accuracy

February 20, 2009 – 5:59 pm

cjrThis week’s edition of my Columbia Journalism Review column takes a historical look at the issue of accuracy. I suggest that today’s changing media landscape is just the latest in a series of major shifts to hit the profession. Excerpt below. Click on the headline to read the full column.

The News Business Is Changing. Again.

Walter Isaacson began his recent Time essay about the news business by declaring that “the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions.” He suggested that a micropayment system could help encourage people to pay for online news. For all of its faults, Isaacson’s argument did micropayments proud by inspiring many people to give their own two cents on the matter.

Setting aside the micropayments issue, we’re left with Isaacson’s declaration about the news business. Whether or not you share Isaacson’s view that journalism is in a state of crisis, these are undeniably interesting times for the profession. A wave of change is crashing over journalism and the business built around it. By my count, it’s the fourth such wave, at least in terms of accuracy and quality.

The first wave occured in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe during the birth of the newspaper. Prior to that time, printed news came in the form of “newsbooks.” These were one-off publications containing a mix of commentary and news that was gathered by word of mouth, from ship captains, or simply by copying from other newsbooks. Their ephemeral nature—a newsbook might appear one day never to be seen again—meant that most publishers didn’t have to worry about someone complaining about an inaccuracy in a previous issue. That changed when publishers started adhering to a set production frequency. The newsbook became the newspaper …

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CJR column: Glass Houses

February 13, 2009 – 4:28 pm

cjrMy weekly Columbia Journalism Review online column takes a look at the pitfalls of reporting about other people’s mistakes. An excerpt is below. The full column archive is here.

Glass Houses

It’s not recognized as one of the fundamentals of the profession, but journalists spend a lot of time pointing out other people’s mistakes.
Major news over the past few weeks has included Cabinet nominees that erred in their tax filings, a famous baseball player who took performance enhancing drugs, and an Olympic champion who inhaled performance inhibiting drugs.
Journalists spend a lot of time holding public officials and institutions accountable for their actions. That inevitably means we spend time on the mistake beat: who made them, why they made them, and whether or not they offered an appropriate apology.
It’s important work, but it also leaves the press open to accusations of hypocrisy when it does a poor job of admitting and correcting its own mistakes …

By Craig Silverman | Posted in CJR Column | View Comments

CJR column and Toronto Star op-ed about the Crunks

December 21, 2008 – 5:09 pm

On Friday, Columbia Journalism Review online published my latest weekly column. Read it here. I also wrote a Saturday op-ed for the Toronto Star about the year in errors and corrections. Below are excerpts from both pieces.

CJR column:

The Year in Errata

About a month ago, I began the laborious and depressing task of scouring the archives of Regret the Error to find the best of the worst in media errors and corrections from 2008. I published my annual round-up earlier this week, and you can read it here, along with a month-by-month listing of incidents of plagiarism and fabrication.

It’s strange enough that I spent an hour or two a day tracking accuracy news and reading hundreds of corrections. Then, once a year, I go back and spend hours re-reading everything I published. Setting aside the obvious element of repetition, the worst part is having to relive a year of journalism scandals, errors and ethical infractions …

Toronto Star:

Another year of errors and regrets

Readers of the New Hampshire-based Valley News couldn’t help but shake their heads. On July 21, the paper’s lead story reported Barack Obama had called the situation in Afghanistan “precarious,” but the biggest news was far above the fold: the paper had misspelled its own name. People were reading the Valley Newss.

“Readers may have noticed that the Valley News misspelled its own name on yesterday’s front page,” read a subsequent editor’s note. “Given that we routinely call on other institutions to hold themselves accountable for their mistakes, let us say for the record: we sure feel silly.”

Take heart, Valley News – you’re in good company.

Since 2004, I have been tracking press errors and corrections on my website, RegretTheError.com. Every year at this time I publish the best of the worst, along with a month-by-month catalogue of incidents of plagiarism and fabrication. In both cases, I have a lot of material to work with.

As a journalist, my professional pride takes a hit when, for example, the venerable Associated Press describes Senator Joseph Lieberman as a former “Democratic vice-presidential prick” or The Australian misquotes a beauty pageant contestant as having said she believes in “injustice and inequality.” …

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CJR Daily column: Scrubbing away their sins

December 5, 2008 – 1:13 pm

This week’s edition of my Columbia Journalism Review Daily column is online here. Inspired by the example of Wales Online (background), I look at the issue of scrubbing. Here’s the opening of the column:

Scrubbing Away Their Sins

We used to be able to throw out the news; to disappear it.

The morning paper would find its way into the trash. A radio or television newscast would float off into the ether. It’s a cliché to say it by now, but the Web has changed that.

Articles and broadcasts now reside in online archives, are quoted or embedded on blogs, and republished on other news sites. Google keeps a snapshot of the original page cached on its servers. The new permanence of news makes it more important than ever to initially get a story right, lest an error rocket around the world. But when prevention fails, a suitable correction must follow. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen …

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New column for Columbia Journalism Review Daily

December 2, 2008 – 11:57 am

I’m a bit late announcing this, but I’ve started writing a weekly column for Columbia Journalism Review’s website. It’s called “Regret the Error” and runs every Friday on CJR.org. I’ve written eight columns so far, and you can read them all here.

This column is a chance for me to provide some context for notable corrections and errors. I also include the week’s best corrections and apologies. Below are links to some recent columns, and I’ll be posting my latest offering to the site each week.

Everything Old Is New Again

Just over two months ago, shares of UAL, the parent company of United Airlines, fell by as much as 76 percent. The root cause of the drop in price was a Chicago Tribune article published on the website of Florida’s Sun-Sentinel that reported United was filing for bankruptcy. Eventually, the story found its way onto Google News, where…

The Art of the Fake Correction

The groups responsible for this week’s fake edition of The New York Times took great care to produce a newspaper that looked like the real thing. They mimicked the paper’s fonts and layout, included an imagined column by Thomas Friedman, and even launched an accompanying website. Regular Times readers also experienced the familiar sensation of finding…

Apologies Not Acceptable

The Washington Post’s correction policy has some elegant turns of phrase, including “Preventing and correcting mistakes are two sides of the coin of our realm: accuracy.” But it says nothing about apologies. Could that be because “The Washington Post doesn’t apologize”?
That quote was attributed to a Post editor in an e-mail published by the Washington City…

Weapons of Mass Reduction

In its most basic and useful form, a correction fixes erroneous reporting and provides a public admission for an error. Though it rarely tops 100 words, the correction, when properly deployed, can also be transformed into a weapon of mass reduction (as in ego).
Witness, for example, The Washington Post’s choice of words this week when correcting…

A Treasury of Page Six Corrections

Gossip is a cutthroat business. It’s also an error-prone one.
Mistakes are inevitable when you trade in rumors and rely on “spies” and self-interested publicists to feed you product. Or, yes, when you simply make things up in order to sell magazines or newspapers.
The New York Post’s Page Six, the grande dame of old school gossip columns, has had…

Ils Regretteront L’Erreur

Le Monde, a highly respected French newspaper, committed an error so egregious on Wednesday that its editors believed the only way to correct their mistake was to publish a front page apology.
Had the paper falsely accused someone of a crime, or damaged a company’s stock price as a result of incorrect reporting? Maybe it had discovered an incident of…

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President Multitasker

November 18, 2008 – 8:00 am

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said he misspoke when he stated in The Journal News that President George W. Bush watched “SportsCenter” at night in his residence instead of reading his briefings for the next day. Fleischer wanted to clarify that Bush did read his briefings while watching “SportsCenter.”

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Magazines | View Comments

Rest is fine

November 19, 2007 – 8:00 am

A few misfires found their way into the September/October issue. In Terry A. Dalton’s piece on Mike Pride, an editor added a phrase asserting that Pride started his thirty-year career at the Concord Monitor on the sports desk. In fact, he started at the Monitor as the managing editor, and had been a sports writer earlier in his career at The Tampa Tribune, among other papers. In that article, we also reported that Felice Belman had left the Monitor three times for jobs at bigger dailies, only to be lured back to Concord. One of those times she left to work on a gubernatorial campaign.
In Steve Wasserman’s bio at the end of the cover story, “Goodbye to All That,” we should have mentioned in the interest of full disclosure that among Wasserman’s clients at the literary agency Kneerim & Williams at Fish & Richardson is the Columbia Journalism Review.
In that same piece, we reported that the books editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had been “shunted aside” in a reconfiguration of the newspaper’s arts coverage, and that book reviews had been “largely replaced” with wire copy. As explored in a piece by Julia M. Klein on page 40, the entire paper was being reconfigured, not just arts, and many jobs were altered. The books editor in fact resigned rather than reapply for the new books job, she says, because she did not like the direction books coverage was heading. The AJC’S current coverage includes more column inches on books and authors than in the past, though a substantial minority of book criticism is from wire services.
In his profile of Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo, David Glenn wrote that TPM “was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil.” This assertion ignores some important work done on the story by McClatchy Newspapers’ D.C. bureau.
And finally, we regret that we spelled Catherine Zeta-Jones’s name with a K, and called the Drug Enforcement Administration an Agency.

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