The New York Times has a new online corrections page. For several years the page (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/corrections/index.html) was updated to show only that day’s corrections. Now it links to the seven most recent days of corrections: It also has a list of recently corrected articles: Both these things are improvements. The links to recent days of [...]
A window of opportunity is open right now for online journalists to build accuracy and accountability into the publishing systems we use every day … Editors at the dawn of the web understood they had to be accountable for changes they made to published stories, and so improvised a routine for handling substantive corrections: Fix [...]
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 [...]
While at the Online News Association conference in Washington a couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to spend some time with my friend David Cohn. David is one of my favorite people in journalism. He's the founder of Spot.Us, the excellent crowdfunded journalism platform, and we first met several years ago when we [...]
A good compare and contrast with media accountability over mistakes.Yesterday, the Nieman Journalism Lab broke an embargo over a Pew Research Centre study. When they realised, they removed the story and apologised on Twitter, and once it was republished, added the following note on the bottom: "[Editor's note: Originally, we accidentally published this post too [...]
Scott Rosenberg and Mark Follman of MediaBugs released a new report this week that highlights some corrections-related problems with Bay Area news outlets. (I’m an unpaid advisor to the project, but didn’t have any involvement with the report.) Here’s the core information: The results of MediaBugs’ first survey of Bay Area media correction practices show [...]
Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander continues to beaver away on the corrections beat. (See some of his previous work here.) Yesterday’s column looked at the paper’s less than effective process for enabling readers to report errors: … Many readers have also complained that the Web site doesn’t offer an effortless way to report journalistic errors. [...]
One of my pet concepts is that we should be pushing out corrections, rather than requiring readers to go hunting for them. Pushing out corrections means offering them via RSS or email, placing them within a listing of the latest news and articles, and finding ways to make corrections more prominent, and more a part [...]
Dan Gillmor wrote an interesting post entitled Eleven Things I’d Do If I Ran a News Organization, and I’m a fan of number four: 4. We would create a service to notify online readers, should they choose to sign up for it, of errors we’ve learned about in our journalism. Users of this service could [...]
Matt Thompson, a fellow the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, wrote an interesting post about corrections for his Newsless blog. He notes the limitations of the online corrections pages of some newspaper websites, and also calls for a new way of pushing corrections out to readers: We could do much more with [...]
This is the final Regret post for 2008. Regular posting will resume on January 5, 2009. I’m usually so busy tracking corrections and errors that I don’t get a chance to write about the best ways to prevent and correct mistakes. With 2008 coming to a close, it’s a perfect time to list some of [...]
One common criticism of blogs is their supposed lack of factual reporting and a proper system for corrections. But many blogs do impressive work in both areas. Here’s one example. Torontoist recently announced a new corrections system. It incorporates a corrections box within the post, as well as a good use of tags, comments and [...]
