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 can still exist, but it should not be the primary focus. Ombudsmen need to be more public and interactive in their role and deliver content with greater frequency. (Hey, we’re now in a real time world of news.) A blog is the best way to start moving in that direction. A survey of ONO members found that more of them now have a blog, which is good news. Though the next question is of course what you do with that blog. Well, ombudsmen should…

2. Curate the Conversation – That same survey of ombudsman highlighted the fact that this is a deliberative position. Ombuds try to take the long view on things; they are not firing off opinions and recommendations left and right. (Thus the appeal of a weekly column, or an even longer process of investigation.) As one survey respondent put it, “It takes a good bit of thinking to be fair.” Another comment made at the conference echoed this: “We can’t give instantaneous replies – we have to think and analyze.” But who says ombudsmen should only focus on their own opinion and deliberations? The reporting and other work done by their news organization results in a groundswell of opinion and reaction, and a good ombud will track this and pay attention to what people are saying.

A good ombud should also blog about what they see and hear. An ombudsman’s blog could be filled with pointers to content that is attracting a lot of reaction; it could supply a curated collection of interesting and notable comments from the organization’s website and elsewhere. Create Storifys of what people are saying on Twitter. Be a bridge between the content and reaction to it. Then use that same blog, and a column, to provide commentary and perspective. To hold the organization accountable. With this approach, suddenly the ombud becomes a valuable source of curation and newsgathering, as well as opinion. That’s a damn good way to demonstrate your value.

3. Make It Public – An ombudsman’s job involves answering a ton of e-mails and phone calls. They are constantly communicating with members of the public, which is a very important function. Yet few realize the value they bring in this respect. An ombudsman is in many ways the face of an organization because he has to respond to comments and questions. That’s not true for all reporters and editors. A great way to enhance the value of this role is to make these exchanges public. (Though people should have the right to request a private exchange, of course.) Each ombudsman’s blog should have a regular mailbag feature where questions are posed and answered in public. They should also call upon editors and reporters to respond to readers on the blog. It’s about having a conversation and providing a forum for readers. This could help bring in more traffic, which is another way to create value. On top of that, a public archive of questions and answers could form the basis of a useful FAQ-like database of questions and answers. This eliminates the need for an ombud to answer the same question over and over again. If a frequently asked question suddenly has a new or updated answer, he can just update with a new blog post to make that information public.

4. Report Like An Ombudsman (As Well As A Journalist) - Most government ombudsmen publish an annual or twice-a-year report. This report reviews the highs and lows of the department or area that they oversee, makes recommendations, and also provides important statistics and data. News ombudsmen should take a page from their government counterparts. Keep and publish relevant statistics about errors, accuracy and corrections. (Some already do this.) Keep data about the most praised and the most controversial stories. Make this data public, while also providing perspective and recommendations not offered in a weekly column. This report will be of value to both the organization and the public because it enhances accountability and transparency and fosters discussion (which could take place on the blog!).

5. Share Your Skills – A journalist who did a stint as an ombudsman at a city paper once told me that every journalist should have to spend time in that job because it will help them understand how their work can have an effect on people, and how to deal with the public. Rather than try to make everyone in a newsroom spend a day or two on the ombud beat, it’s more realistic to have ombudsmen offer training and guidance when it comes to handling criticism and feedback from the public. Journalists increasingly respond to the community in comments, on Twitter and in other venues. They need training to help do this in a respectful, productive way. Who better than an ombudsman to help them navigate these waters?

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 know.

But what if it turned out that this same campaign strategist had, before the election, been paid to help with the creation of Fox News?

Getting a bit preposterous, right?

Well, that’s basically what recently happened in Canada, plus a multitude of related disconcerting events. Allow me to lay out one of the stranger media narratives to emerge from up north since Alan Thicke’s son became a Grammy-winning heartthrob …

– via Controversy at “Fox News North”, my latest weekly column for Columbia Journalism Review. Hit the link to read the full account.

User Controlled: First things first: It’s neither feasible nor desirable to have Twitter play a role in determining which tweets do or don’t deserve a correction. This feature has to be controlled by users and only policed by Twitter when there are abuses. Which means the system has to have proper safeguards to prevent abuse.

Notification, Not Exactly Correction: In my vision, the Twitter correction function would let the owner of an account notify all retweeters that a corrected tweet has been issued. Note that I’m not suggesting a user have the ability to force a correction to be retweeted on other people’s accounts. That would too easily lend itself to spam-like uses. So, for me, the solution is to enable someone to automatically send @replies to everyone who retweeted the initial, incorrect tweet in order to inform them of the correction. The function itself takes the form of targeted reply tweets.

Workflow: Here’s how it would look in action:

• User tweets “Mrs. Smith has won the election.”

• That tweet is retweeted by 150 users, using Twitter’s official retweet button.

• Thirty minutes later, it becomes clear the original tweet was incorrect.

• User goes back to their original, incorrect tweet and selects the “correction” button on Twitter.com (or their preferred client), which prompts them to write a corrected tweet. “Correction: Votes still being counted in Mrs. Smith race. She has not been elected.” User hits send.

• Users who retweeted the original tweet receive this reply message: “@username: Correction: Votes still being counted in Mrs. Smith race. She has not been elected. Pls RT”

• The above reply tweet would also be highlighted with a special correction icon, much the same way retweets are highlighted with the square arrows icon from Twitter. (May I be so bold as to suggest using the Report an Error Alliance icon? We’ll give it to Twitter to use for free.)

• Users who click the retweet button on the correction message will also send the message out with the correction icon, thus helping draw attention to it among their followers.

Concerns: There are of course implementation issues, not to mention the fact that we have no idea if Twitter has any interest in this proposal. Aside from those issues, one obvious concern with my proposal is that the correction function could still be abused. By retweeting someone you are opening yourself up to receiving what is in effect a mass message. So I’m still concerned about nasty folks turning this correction feature into a way to spam users. There’s also something of an educational challenge in teaching people how it works. Though I suppose the same can be said for Twitter as a whole. I’ve tried to explain hashtags and retweets to newbies, and it’s not as if those are the most natural things in the world, either.

Omission: One possible way to integrate corrections into Twitter would be to use the annotations feature. I left this out of my proposal because annotations are not yet live, and I’m probably not the best person to figure out how to make this happen. My hope is that annotations might enable you to create a “correction” attribute for a tweet that helps it attract attention as a correction. I believe annotations can be useful in helping create an effective corrections framework for Twitter, and would love to learn more about how that might work.

What do you think?

This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men.

TBD signaled back in the summer that it intended to have a unique approach by publishing a blog post prior to launch that outlined the site’s commitment to accuracy and corrections. As I noted in a column at the time, “TBD is trying to do things differently when it comes to local news, and it has already moved in that direction by being up front about how the site will manage corrections and fix mistakes.”

The above correction, and the way the site handled its popularity, seems to reinforce the TBD approach. Once the team realized they had a viral hit on their hands, the site went on to publish two blog posts 1, 2 that dealt with the correction and its impact. TBD folks have been talking about it on Twitter, and the offending blogger, Amanda Hess, was also featured on TBD’s “MoJo power half-hour” show to talk about her error. The blog posts emphasized that the correction demonstrated the site’s commitment to transparency. Our system works, they seemed to be saying. And whadya know, it’s also good for traffic …

– From my latest column for Columbia Journalism Review, TBD and the Accuracy Boast.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.” …

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 …