It also has a list of recently corrected articles:

Both these things are improvements. The links to recent days of corrections makes additional corrections easily accessible from the page. The list of recently corrected articles also provides some nice context, as some readers may recognize a familiar headline and click through to read a correction they may have missed.

Three additions I’d like to see are an RSS feed for corrections, a link to a page where readers can learn more about the paper’s corrections policy, and a form people can use to submit a correction. (Have a look at the form on the Chicago Tribune’s corrections page.)

Apart from that, it would be great to see the Times embrace a report an error button for its content.

A window of opportunity is open right now for online journalists to build accuracy and accountability into the publishing systems we use every day …

– via Time to bake smart correction tools into news platforms”, a post by MediaBugs’ Scott Rosenberg. Good, straightforward suggestions here.

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?

At one point during the conference, David pulled me aside and asked to do a quick video interview about errors and corrections. (He did the same with a bunch of people who are far more awesome than me, and you can check out those videos here.) The resulting video is below. Some funky lighting means I'm a just a little more pink than usual…

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 early and jumped the gun on an embargo. Our sincere apologies to the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, who have since lifted the embargo.]"

The Nieman site carries trackbacks, and so on their post there is a prominent link to a blog criticising them for the embargo breach – "Here we go again: Another Pew report embargo broken, this time by Nieman Journalism Lab".

Not only is Nieman carrying this link, but their author, Laura McGann, has gone on to the Embargo Watch site to leave a comment personally explaining what had happened.

It is an exemplary example of best practice correction and clarification – and one that shames the attitude of most mainstream media outlets when they make errors, which is generally to react slowly to complaints of wrongdoing, and then try and pretend it never happened.

– via "Nieman Journalism Lab shows the way to do apologies and corrections online" from Martin Belam's blog. This is a nice little case study of how to reach out and add a personal touch to a correction. I also like the fact that Nieman didn't censor the trackbacks. And Belam is right that too many mainstream outlets are still scrubbing their mistakes.

The results of MediaBugs’ first survey of Bay Area media correction practices show that 21 out of 28 news sites examined — including many of the region’s leading daily newspapers and broadcast news outlets — provide no corrections link on their websites’ home pages and article pages. The websites for 17 of the 28 news organizations examined have no corrections policy or substantive corrections content at all.

Sites that do offer corrections-related content frequently make it relatively difficult to find: It is located two or three obscure clicks into the site, or requires visitors to use the site’s search function. Once located, the corrections content is, in most cases, poorly organized and not easily navigated.

As Rosenberg noted in an email to me, this isn’t exactly surprising. Online correction pages are still the exception, not the rule. The same is true for error reporting tools. The MediaBugs report offers some much needed proof that media organizations aren’t putting the proper amount of thought and effort into corrections. Here’s what Rosenberg wrote in a blog post for PBS MediaShift Idea Lab (where I’m an editor):

Fifteen years ago, in the early days of web publishing, it might have been understandable for editors to have a hard time figuring out how to handle corrections: This pliable medium was new and strange.

But news on the web is no longer in its infancy, and “We’re new to this” just doesn’t cut it anymore as an explanation for the kind of poor practices our MediaBugs survey documents. The explanations you generally hear are truthful but don’t excuse the problems: “Our content management system makes it too hard to do that” or “we just don’t have the resources to do that” or “we’ve been meaning to fix that for a while but never seem to get around to it.”

The web excels at connecting people. That’s what its technology is for. Yet when it comes to the most basic areas of accuracy and accountability, the professional newsrooms of the Bay Area (and so many other communities) continue to do a poor job of connecting with their own readers.

Rosenberg and I agree that it’s important to create a standardized error reporting function for the web. Something that every organization can implement in the same way. (He cited RSS as an example of how this kind of standardization can work.) I wrote about this idea in a recent column for Columbia Journalism Review:

Another example would be RSS. One way that it achieved mass adoption was by becoming standardized on major blogging platforms and then adopted by major Web sites. At the same time, the adoption of the RSS icon created a universal visual cue that helped drive understanding among Internet users.

Rosenberg is currently pondering the creation of something similar for “report an error” functionality. There are currently some large news Web sites that offer this—including the Toronto Star and Huffington Post (though theirs is hidden near the bottom of articles)—but it is by no means a standard. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and CNN, among many others, don’t include that option on their articles and pages. It’s such a simple, effective way to collect error reports, not to mention give readers a chance to participate and contribute.

But where it should be placed on the page? Do we need a universal icon? How about the interface that pops up after you click on that button? Should that be standardized? The fundamental idea is sound, but there are lots of details to work out. Rosenberg is thinking of the best way to move forward with the idea, and I’m hoping to help.

Who else wants to pitch in?

I also dedicated a recent edition of my weekly Columbia Journalism Review column to the issue of corrections reporting.

Thanks, Daniel!

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 of the river of news. I touched on this idea in a post, and in this column for Columbia Journalism Review. This post at Newsless raised similar ideas.

Well, now add Steven Levy to the list of people who are thinking about pushing out corrections. In a piece for the May issue of Wired, he examines why Amazon isn’t pushing out corrections to its Kindle books:

Before a recent trip, I downloaded the latest Stephen Hunter novel to my Kindle. Hunter writes about shooters, so it’s not surprising that the name of the book is I, Sniper.

Not that you’d know it from the title screen. The only words on that e-ink page were “I, Snipper.” …

I thought “snipper” was a pretty big snafu, so I decided to play a little joke on my buddy, an editor at Simon & Schuster, which published the book. I took a picture of the misspelled title page and emailed it to him. The next day he emailed me back: “Because of your eagle eye, Amazon is fixing today, even correcting existing Kindle purchases.”

So why is my title page still wrong? According to Amazon.com’s Drew Herdner, “When we find a copyediting or formatting error in a book, we ask the publisher for a new file and replace the one in the Kindle Store so that new purchases of the book do not have the error. We will update the file for a book a customer has already purchased only when the customer asks us to.”

My Kindle purchase “was treated just like an error in a normal p-book,” says Simon & Schuster’s senior publishing manager, Leah Wasielewski, using a term that will be increasingly useful as the e-variety approaches the norm. The publisher’s belief that Amazon had automatically changed sold versions, too, was “a miscommunication,” she adds.

The whole idea of tampering with books after someone buys them, of course, doesn’t apply to, um, p-books, which are not only in the possession of buyers but also inconveniently stamped indelibly with ink …

But sometimes a book can stand a little mending. Consider the case of a copyediting mistake that changes the meaning of a crucial sentence in a novel. Or a nonfiction author who wants to enrich a book with a new chapter about developments in the field. And wouldn’t a travel book be improved if it reflected new places to visit and current phone numbers?

All good examples. Ebooks are living books. Publishers and authors should find a way to easily and ethically offer corrections and updates to readers.

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 choose to be notified of major errors only (in our judgement) or all errors, however insignificant we may believe them to be.

I created a system like this for the Regret The Error book. Slate’s Jack Shafer also offers an RSS feed for his corrections. It’s an easy thing to do, and it’s a shame that so few media organizations offer a feed or email subscription for their corrections.

We could do much more with corrections, of course. At a minimum, corrections should be databased. This shouldn’t be any more difficult than adding a correction field to each story in our CMS, instead of just writing our corrections into the body of the story itself. It would allow readers to search for corrections by date, section or author, rather than having to check the corrections page every day to see what’s been corrected recently.

We should also be much more proactive about getting corrections to readers. If you read something on our news site that has changed or been corrected since you last saw it, we should alert you of the change during your next visit to our site.

His second paragraph offers an idea that fits with my corrections and accuracy wishes for 2009. Thompson also had this interesting suggestion:

About four years ago, I daydreamed about an independent, crowd-sourced corrections site that would allow anyone to post a correction or clarification to information contained at any URI. In some ways, with the ubiquity of browser plug-ins and the like, that type of thing would be easier today.

It is easier today, and SpinSpotter is probably the most interesting initiative trying to make this happen.

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 the things news organizations should be doing with online corrections, and share some of my ideas for new prevention and correction practices.

I decided to write these suggestions in the form of “Wouldn’t it be great if…” because if any or all of them take flight this year, it would be a great thing for corrections and accuracy. Here are my accuracy and corrections wishes for the new year:

Wouldn’t it be great if every news website had a regularly-updated online corrections page linked from their homepage?

Wouldn’t it be great if all news sites placed corrections within the offending article?

Wouldn’t it be great if news sites stopped scrubbing away errors?

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a way to automatically notify a website that a correction was made to an article they’ve linked to? I’ve taken to calling this the “Reverse Trackback” or a “Correctforward.” A Trackback is a way of automatically notifying a site that its content (usually a blog post) has been linked by someone else. We need to reverse this and create a system that spiders out a correction notice to news sites or blogs that previously cited the original, incorrect article. The notification could, for example, take the form of a comment on the related post. (“This is an automated message to inform you that the Regret the Error post you linked to has been corrected. Please read the corrected post here [link].”) This would go a long way to helping push corrections out to the public, which is what needs to be done on the web. We shouldn’t expect people to go hunting for corrections.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a “Notify Me If This Article Is Corrected” button alongside all of the “Print” and “Share” buttons that appear on most online articles? The reader could simply enter their email address and receive an email if a correction was issued for the story. It’s great that more and more news sites are placing corrections within the story, but how many people go back and reread an article? A lot of readers are not seeing the corrections. As I noted above, we need to find a way to push corrections out to readers. This tool would enable readers to receive corrections for articles that they consider particularly important or useful.

Wouldn’t it be great if all news sites had an online form like the Chicago Tribune’s to help people report errors?

Wouldn’t it be great if readers could receive credit for spotting errors? For example, if a site asks people to create a user account, then that person’s profile could list “Number of corrections submitted” and “Number of corrections accepted.” It could also include “Letters to the editor published,” and a listing of that person’s comments on the site. Maybe the best error-spotter earns a prize at the end of the month or year? This system would encourage people to participate and contribute — and it would help decrease the number of uncorrected errors, which are a big problem.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could create standardized accuracy checklists for reporters, editors and other newsroom staff? These checklists (examples: 1,2,3) would help people take a systematic approach to verifying articles before they’re published. To see how checklists are helping improve intensive care in hospitals, read this great New Yorker article.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a central place where people from different newsrooms could share tips for achieving accuracy? There’s a lot of knowledge out there, but it’s scattered among different organizations. A wiki for accuracy tips would help share knowledge and go a long way towards creating best practices.

What else would be great to see happen this year? Add your thoughts in the comments.

…As of today, Torontoist is implementing a new standard format for all corrections to posts. Any significant corrections or clarifications will be made as quickly as possible, and a note acknowledging them will be written by the editor-in-chief or an assistant editor and will appear as follows at the bottom of a post:

CORRECTION: MAY 29, 2008In the box will be a full explanation of the error made (citing the article’s original words as appropriate), and a full explanation of the correction.

When that error is appended and the correction made, an editor or assistant editor will also post a comment as soon as possible, linking to the correction, so that the comment thread stays up to date (and in context) with the post. Additionally, the tag “corrections” will be added to the post—and a link to that tag will be added, for now, in our top menu. (You can also subscribe to the tag, as you can with any other tag, using RSS.)

For now, we are still getting a feel for how this system will be used. (A—gasp—misplaced apostrophe: less likely to receive a formal correction; a typo—depends; misspelled names: probably; egregious errors: uh, yes.) There may be some growing pains. No matter what, though, the help of our readers will be invaluable in spotting mistakes and fixing them, and we’d love it if you could help report a mistake either by posting a comment or e-mailing an editor privately. (Depending on the severity of the error, private e-mailing allows for more back-and-forth.)

With the new system, we are trying to be transparent; to admit to, highlight, explain, and ultimately own up to our mistakes when we make them and take steps to prevent them from happening again. Our goal is that that process, in addition to making our errors and their corrections more prominent, will also make them more and more rare—and we’ll all be better for it.

Here’s a recent post that includes a correction. The post has a correction box at the bottom, and you can read the editor’s correction comment here. Corrected posts are filed under this tag.