From my latest column for Columbia Journalism Review, here are my five suggestions for how news ombudsmen can make themselves essential in today’s newsroom: 1. Build Your Blog – Many ombudsmen, especially those at newspapers, write a regular column. This used to be the most visible, tangible benefit of an ombudsman. Going forward, the column [...]
Imagine for a moment that we’re in the middle of a presidential election. Now imagine that late in the campaign Rupert Murdoch publishes an editorial in the New York Post condemning a high level Republican campaign strategist for passing along incorrect information about the Democratic nominee to Fox News. Kind of hard to picture, I [...]
I dedicated my most recent Columbia Journalism Review column to the current debate about whether or not a news organization or journalist should delete an incorrect tweet. I also outlined how a Twitter correction function might work: User Controlled: First things first: It’s neither feasible nor desirable to have Twitter play a role in determining [...]
It’s a rare and wonderful thing to see a news organization criticized for making too big of a deal about an error and correction made by one of its writers. The issue is usually the opposite—a call for transparency, rather than a plea to, well, shut up. But here we are, thanks to a now-famous [...]
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 [...]
… 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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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. [...]
This 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 [...]
My 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 [...]
This 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. [...]
My 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.” Report an error
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 [...]
