The future of corrections
Corrections are high on the long list of broken elements on news websites.
If a news article you read is later corrected, chances are very good that you will never know. Most news orgs, including the New York Times, still run a daily list of corrections as an article, tucked somewhere deep inside the bowels of the site. On the Times site, it’s not easy to see previous corrections; the Star Tribune offers an unhelpful dump of links as its corrections section. Many organizations have at least advanced to the point where the correction is posted to the original article, but many haven’t even gotten that far.1
Handling corrections is one more thing blogs do better than articles. Because blogs are linear over time, bloggers can insert a correction into the flow of posts, alerting their communities to prior mistakes. And instead of the typically opaque correction news organizations give, bloggers have developed a wonderful standard practice — preserving the original text but striking through it, so readers know exactly what changed.
Wikis have the potential to do even better. The public revision history is an astonishing feat of transparency, allowing you to view at any moment exactly how a page has changed since you last saw it.2 Whenever you revisit a story on a news site, you should be able to see exactly how it’s evolved over time. While at MSNBC, Rex Sorgatz once mused about the terrific notion of placing a slider at the top of every news story that would allow each visitor to see the story’s gradual transformation. This sort of idea becomes even more valuable when the stories are intended to live indefinitely, updated as developments emerge.
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.3
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. I constantly wonder about the accuracy or completeness of information I come across (often on major media sites just as much as indie blogs). I can think of a hundred logistical reasons why such a resource could never work, but folks practicing journalism could do a lot to make it unnecessary.
A robust corrections policy should be part of the ethic of every site that purports to do journalism. We should do our absolute best not to get facts wrong, but when we inevitably do, we should do our absolute best to make sure our visitors know it.
- Take this doozy of a correction: In a Jim Souhan column on Page C1 Tuesday, the Ottawa player who retaliated for a Cal Clutterbuck hit was misidentified and the biting incident involving Jarkko Ruutu [Ed. note: !!] was mischaracterized. Ottawa’s Chris Neil did not play in the Saturday night game, and Ruutu was suspended for two games in January for biting the thumb of Buffalo’s Andrew Peters. Not only would you never know the original article was corrected, I’m having trouble figuring out from the two articles what exactly did and didn’t happen. [↩]
- Like many things on Wikipedia, a diff page — which shows the difference between any two revisions of an article — seems prohibitively technical to laypeople. [↩]
- I recognize that this would be a complete turnaround from the current, shamefaced way we treat corrections. I’ve worked with respected longtime reporters who have fought tooth-and-nail to keep minor, unquestionable corrections — such as misspellings — out of the paper. [↩]
No related posts.
I think your wiki idea is a good one, as is a crowd-sourced corrections site… It would help police after-the-fact changes from the new media and old media alike… things are not as pure as you portray in the new media… here are two documented instances where they made changes without noting them. http://tinyurl.com/ex-facto-post
ricky
5 Mar 09 at 6:00 am
Great post, Matt. Your call for a corrections notification system for readers is really on point. I've been trying to generate some interest in the idea of a "reverse trackback" that could also provide an automated way to notify blogs and other sites if an article they quoted has been corrected/updated. I wrote about it here:
http://www.regrettheerror.com/regret-articles/cor...
Also, you should check out the way Slate handles corrections; they have a very cool system that shows readers exactly where the mistake occurred in a given article.
Craig_Silverman
6 Mar 09 at 1:15 am
Ben Welsh at the LA Times started an interesting corrections application a little while ago that seems to fit with this post: http://github.com/palewire/django-correx/tree/mas...
It wouldn't be hard, I think, to build in a way to attach corrections to stories, blog posts, etc, and publish a stream of those, linking back to the original work and making it easy for readers to find what's been changed. Part of it is cultural, as you said, but the tech side shouldn't be too hard.
Chris_Amico
7 Mar 09 at 10:26 pm
Matt,
As new methods to track errors develop, under what circumstances, if any, do you think journalists should be allowed to comment on corrections?
Journalists do this already, but it's vague: "Due to an editing error…" Errors hurt credibility, but, at least in my experience, not all errors are malicious or even the product of stupidity. Part of me would love to be able to say, "the CMS choked when we tried to save," or "we're shortstaffed today," or "there was miscommunication between the reporter and editor," or whatever.
We fix problems as soon as we see them. We try to improve.
My initial concerns: First, this may be looking for love in all the wrong places. Nobody may care whether we're blameworthy for a mistake. Publicizing will still, fairly or unfairly, hurt our credibility over time.
Second, journalists would need an incentive to actually explain errors more than "due to an editing error…," and who wants to admit a mistake?
Perhaps, though, news organizations' credibility should be punished for errors no matter whether the error was malicious. I would be open to that argument as well.
David L.
9 Mar 09 at 7:09 am
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