When should a news organization correct or remove archival content? Where should online corrections be placed? How should readers be encouraged to report mistakes and request corrections? These are some of the common questions I’m asked about online corrections. I think a lot of news organizations continue to struggle with them, and to look for [...]
Leslie Plommer is an associate editor in the office of the Guardian readers editor (ombudsman). She occasionally fills in for the editor by taking over the weekly column, as she did last weekend. Plommer shared a bit of news about the paper’s print corrections column, and announced a new webpage dedicated to accuracy and standards. [...]
In a positive move for U.K. tabloids, the Daily Mail started publishing a regular corrections column. Sister papers the Mail on Sunday and Metro are doing the same. Here’s the first column from the Sunday paper. It included this introductory text: The Mail on Sunday strives for complete accuracy in every article, but it is [...]
Salon’s online corrections page used to offer links to corrections going back several years. This was good and rather unique thing. Not anymore. At some (recent) point, the site’s corrections page was changed to remove all current and archival corrections. The page now contains boilerplate text informing readers that corrections are placed on the offending [...]
Poynter’s Steve Myers today published an article that suggests Reuters learned a couple of important lessons after it published a remarkably wrong David Cay Johnston column. Myers reports that the news organization will soon implement a new way to handle retractions, an update that better adapts to the digital world. .. A notice will be [...]
… It has been my experience, after reporting from many locations around the world and working with others who do, that errors are more likely when covering foreign events and topics, as misspellings, misunderstandings, inaccurate references to professional titles, and poor or incorrect translations from other languages can lead to mistakes. Editors and fact-checkers in [...]
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 [...]
In my job as the social media editor for MediaShift, I’m used to fitting big ideas into tight spaces. But recently, in the fray of 140-character editing, I struggled to condense a curious statistic. Finishing up, I double-checked grammar, the link, and clicked "submit" as usual. It was retweeted more than 100 times see the [...]
A recent edition of my weekly column for Columbia Journalism Review featured a Q&A with PCC director Stephen Abell. He told me that the organization recently set up a working group to come up with guidance regarding online corrections and apologies. The guidelines were published today, and here are the notable sections: The starting point [...]
“We’ve seen the maturation of online journalism, but corrections and error reporting haven’t advanced at the same rate," said Silverman, whose blog Regret the Error focuses on corrections. “In the online environment, mistakes move much farther and faster. It’s extremely important we do our best to prevent and correct them. It’s just basic journalistic hygiene.” [...]
… Most newspapers have longstanding policies on how errors are corrected in print, but if you ask editors and reporters about online corrections in their own newsrooms, you likely will get as many answers as people you ask. … Mobile sites and apps for smartphones and devices like the iPad bring yet another dimension to [...]
I forgot to add a link to my Columbia Journalism Review column from last week, which provides journalists with a wealth of advice and resources for online verification. An excerpt: Content Analysis Author – Is someone identified as the author of the site or article? Google them, look for a personal website. If their byline [...]
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 [...]
Slate published an interesting article by Jeremy Singer-Vine about “What the politics Web site [Politico] deletes from its articles without telling anyone.” From the piece: … How often does Politico, in the din of the news cycle, make significant changes to its copy after publishing it—without telling readers? Part of the answer, of course, depends [...]
I had a great time speaking to several classes at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University last week. (Thanks again to Dan Gillmor for bringing me there.) I gave my usual spiel about errors and corrections and all of the other topics I tend to cover. But one [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
