Regret the Error

This is an interesting twist on the correction. Writer Malcolm Gladwell has taken to his blog to publish a correction to one of his New Yorker articles. A correction will also appear in the magazine (see below), but he used the blog to make sure it gets out as soon as possible. The correction:

To my chagrin, I made an error in my New Yorker piece “None of the Above.” In the “Bell Curve,” Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein did not advocate a “high-tech Indian reservation” for low-IQ groups. Rather, they warned that if current welfare policies continued, we would end up having to build high-tech reservations for those with low IQs–which is a very different argument, obviously (although not, if you think about it, any less ridiculous). I regret the error. The New Yorker will be running a correction.

Excellent. Why not first publish a correction in the medium that’s immediately available, and then follow up with another in the original medium? Of course, it only works if you do both. But by placing a correction in more than one place, you increase the likelihood of readers receiving the correct information.

UPDATE Dec. 17: The magazine has published a correction:

CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, “None of the Above,” Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be “sequestered in a ‘high-tech’ version of an Indian reservation.” In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such “custodialism” and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.

As readers have noted in the comments, the error was quite serious. The correction in the magazine does a better job of communicating this fact. Though if I were one of the authors of The Bell Curve, I would have appreciated an apology.
Thanks, Ernest!