Asking your users to report inaccuracies strikes me as a fabulous idea, and likely very productive see: “someone is wrong on the internet!“ I have no knowledge of the quantity of errors submitted using these forms, or how the corrections process works. My suspicion is that each submitted correction sends an email to some hapless [...]
The folks at the NYTPicker, a blog that reports on the New York Times, took special notice of the corrections page in today’s paper. It is worth highlighting, as the Time published 36 corrections. (I recently profiled the NYTPicker for PBS MediaShift.) Sunday is the biggest day for Times corrections. It’s when the paper corrects [...]
Just over two years ago, the public editor of the Orlando Sentinel wrote a column alerting readers to the fact that the paper had experienced a spike in the number of corrections. He was clear about the cause of the increased errors: When the Sentinel tightened its financial belt back in June, it lost a [...]
The Washington Times made an embarrassing mistake on its website last week. This picture pretty much speaks for itself: Yes, those are the Obama kids. No, they weren’t involved in the story. After being spotted by one blog, the image quickly spread. Some people said it was an example of the Times’ right-wing bias. The [...]
I’m a bit behind in posting links to my weekly column for Columbia Journalism Review online. Here are pointers to three recent columns, with excerpts. My full column archive is online here. Today’s column: A Rare Peek at Why Errors Occur Last Sunday’s New York Times was a treasure trove of accuracy-related information, and I [...]
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 [...]
Bruce Schneier, one of the leading thinkers in IT security, recently wrote a column for Wired.com in which he uses the example of corrupt NBA referee Tim Donaghy to examine systems that suffer from single points of failure. The same concept directly relates to journalism and accuracy. What sorts of systems — IT, financial, NBA [...]
Information that can’t be trusted is not less valuable; it’s worthless. Those words were written by Orlando Sentinel public editor Manning Pynn in an important column published on Sunday. (Romenesko spotted it.) Pynn was moved to write the column after noticing a spike in the number of corrections over recent months. “In the past three [...]
